d debauchery have not yet
brought the penalty of enervation and neurasthenia to the _masses_,
though in certain circles of society, it is becoming painfully evident
that that penalty is being even now exacted.

In this article I have described only mild types of viraginity and
effemination. In the more pronounced types of these singular examples of
atavism or reversion, the victims commit the most unheard of and the
most unnatural acts.

Almost every case of effemination or viraginity can be cured if
recognized and treated in its incipiency. The parents should be the
physicians. They should keep a watchful supervision over their
offspring, and as soon as any evidences of effemination or viraginity
become apparent, treatment, both physical and psychical, should at once
be instituted.

Effemination has occasioned the downfall of many nations; let us guard
against it with all our power. Let us train up our boys to be manly men,
and our girls to be womanly women.

BORDERLANDS AND CRANKDOM.

When that bilious critic and merciless crucifier of human foibles,
Carlyle, himself a degenerate, wrote that nine-tenths of the world were
fools, he was much nearer truth than most men think. When we take an
introspective view of our sane personality, we shudder to see how near
it is to the borderlands of insanity and the bizarre and eccentric world
of crankdom. There hardly lives a man who does not possess some
eccentricity, or who does not cherish, hidden, perhaps, deep within
himself, some small delusion, which he is ashamed to acknowledge to the
outside world. Social relations and the iron rules of custom hold in
place the balance-wheel of many a disordered mind. The mental equipoise
is kept at the normal standard only by the powerful aid of the will,
supported and assisted by extraneous adjuvants, such as fear of
punishment, fear of personal harm, and, above all, by the fear of
ridicule. Many a man hugs his delusions closely to his heart, indulges
them only in the secret recesses of his soul, and, their sole owner and
acquaintance, carries them with him to his grave.

Any man who has a retentive memory, and one capable of minute analysis,
can look back in his life and recall moments when his insane personality
got the better of his will, and ran riot in forbidden pathways. He may
not have committed an insane act; yet the thought, the impulse, the
delusion was there and only outside influences kept it from breaking
fo