same classes in England? Obviously, because, after their day's
labor, they do not drink poisonous liquor in a dirty den of crime, but
go to sip a few glasses of harmless beer in a garden while listening
to the merry sounds of music.

Men _will_ have, and _must_ have, their pleasures. Social reformers
and temperance agitators could not make a greater mistake than by
following the example of the Puritans and tabooing _all_ pleasures.
They ought to distinguish between those that have a tendency to excess
and vice, and those that are harmless and ennobling, encouraging the
latter in every possible way. And first among those that should be
encouraged is music, because it is always ennobling, and can be
enjoyed simultaneously by the greatest number. Its effect is well
described in Margaret Fuller's private journal: "I felt raised above
all care, all pain, all fear, and every taint of vulgarity was washed
out of the world." I think this is an extremely happy expression.
Female writers sometimes have a knack of getting at the heart of a
problem by instinct, more easily than men with their superior
reasoning powers. "Every taint of vulgarity washed out of the world by
music." That is precisely wherein the moral power of music lies; for
vulgarity is the twin sister of vice. It is criminal to commit a
murder; it is vulgar to gloat over the contagious details of it in
books and newspapers. But how rampant vulgarity still is, and how rare
aesthetic culture, is shown by the fact that two-thirds of the
so-called news in many of our daily papers consist of detailed reports
of crimes in all parts of the world, which are eagerly read by
hundreds of thousands, while our concert halls have to be filled with
dead-heads.

There is one more way in which music affects our moral life, to which
I wish to call attention, namely, through its value as a tonic. No
operatic manager has ever thought of advertising his performances as a
tonic, yet he might do so with more propriety than the patent medicine
venders whose grandiloquent advertisements take up so much space in
our newspapers. Plato, in the "Laws," says that "The Gods, pitying the
toils which our race is born to undergo, have appointed holy festivals
in which men rest from their labors." Lucentio, in "The Taming of the
Shrew," advances the same opinion in more definite and pungent terms:

"Preposterous ass! that never read so far
To know the cause why music was ordain'd!
Was