the whole
social behaviour is usually a rapid one. The Rococo age reached many
subtleties, which we do not dream of as yet, but to which the
conspiracy against silence may boldly push us. Read the memoirs of
Casanova, the Italian of the eighteenth century, whose biography gives
a vivid picture of a time in which certainly no one was silent on
sexual affairs and in which life was essentially a chain of gallant
adventures; even the sexual diseases figured as gallant diseases. In
the select American circles it is already noticeable that the
favourites of rich men get a certain social acknowledgment. The great
masses have not reached this stage at present, which is, of course,
very familiar in France. But if we proceed in that rapid rhythm with
which we have changed in the last ten years, ten years hence we may
have substituted the influence of mistresses for the influence of
Tammany grafters, and twenty years hence a Madame Pompadour may be
dwelling not far from the White House and controlling the fate of the
nation with her small hands, as she did for two decades when Louis XV
was king. History has sufficiently shown that these are the logical
consequences of the sensualization of a rich people, whose mind is
filled with sexual problems. Are we to wait, too, until a great
revolution or a great war shakes the nation to its depths and hammers
new ideas of morality into its conscience? Even our literature might
sink still deeper and deeper. If we begin with the sexual problem, it
lies in its very nature that that which is interesting to-day is
to-morrow stale, and new regions of sexuality must be opened. The
fiction of Germany in the last few years shows the whole pathetic
decadence which results. The most abstruse perversions, the ugliest
degenerations of sexual sinfulness, have become the favourite topics,
and the best sellers are books which in the previous age would have
been crushed by police and public opinion alike, but which in the
present time are excused under scientific and sociological pretences,
although they are more corrupt and carry more infection than any
diseases against which they warn.

VII

What is to be done? In one point we all agree: Those who are called to
do so must bend their utmost energy toward the purification of the
outer forms of community life and of the public institutions. Certain
eugenic ideas must be carried through relentlessly; above all, the
sexu