ate but the beauty of undraped couples
wandering through landscapes? What more majestic spectacle than that
of the Teuton father, mother and children going out for an afternoon
promenade, clothed only in the ingenuous consciousness of their
human greatness?

In a race of beings so little modeled after the accepted lines of
pulchritude, all this was laughable. But to the German, condemned
to a vise-like seriousness and to childlikeness, it became
significant and weighty. It was such a grateful revelation not to
have to dream of his loved ones through the unsatisfactory medium of
German clothing.

With his customary excess of logic he plunged headlong into these
ardent waves of the realm of Venus rising unimpeachably from the sea
in her immortal bareness. He began to systematize this
demonstration. Some of the political parties seemed to be in line to
favor this revealment of another radical tenet. German philosophers
made ready to seize upon it with huge mental biceps and labor to
incorporate it beneficently into the Teuton pansophy. Even doctors
of theology were said to view the novel dispensation through the
blue spectacles of their didacticism, and to hesitate and stumble
over the question of greeting these glad visions of a glad
apocalypse. What was truer Protestantism than that there is the
natural body as well as the spiritual body, and that it would be
virtuous to behold outwardly the former as it was virtuous to
recognize inwardly the latter?

The campaign became almost lively. Of course the young Germans,
whose fathers and mothers in their youth had raved over Wagner and
thus shocked their elders, raved over a departure that linked such
possibilities of frankness and loveliness so delectably together.
The Von Tielitzes and Messers were in the seventh heaven.

But Germany, being a northern country ruled severely in the main by
old men, was bound to feel in the end more comfortable in clothes.
Climate governs male and female alike and shapes their habits to its
own tyrannical mandates. The Teutons were doomed to suggest flannel.
So a vast moral revulsion in the form of the much German clothedness
finally rose up and overwhelmed the religion of Nudity--the _Nackt
Kultur_. Although the Teuton male likes to contemplate himself and
be contemplated as candid Mother Nature made him, he could not adapt
himself to the idea of his fleshy women appearing naked before a
critical and commenting world. Momus had at last