st as
insecure as during the Middle Ages.[3]

[Footnote 3: The reader will bear in mind that these words were spoken
in August 1921. Unquestionably, the situation has greatly improved
during the present year(1922).]

As to the subtler and more insidious crimes against the political
state, it is enough to say that graft has become a science in city,
state and nation. Losses by such misapplication of public funds--piled
Pelion on Ossa--no longer run in the millions but the hundreds of
millions. Our city governments are, in many instances, foul cancers on
the body politic; and for us to boast of having solved the problem of
local self-government is as fatuous as for a strong man to exult in his
health when his body is covered with running sores. It has been
estimated that the annual profits from violations of the prohibition
laws have reached $300,000,000. Men who thus violate these laws for
sordid gain are not likely to obey other laws, and the respect for law
among all classes steadily diminishes as our people become familiar
with, and tolerant to, wholesale criminality. Whether the moral and
economic results of Prohibition overbalance this rising wave of crime,
time will tell.

_In limine_, let us note the significant fact that this spirit of
revolt against authority is not confined to the political state, and
therefore its causes lie beyond that sphere of human action.

Human life is governed by all manner of man-made laws--laws of art, of
social intercourse, of literature, music, business--all evolved by
custom and imposed by the collective will of society. Here we find the
same revolt against tradition and authority.

In music, its fundamental canons have been thrown aside and discord has
been substituted for harmony as its ideal. Its culmination--jazz--is a
musical crime. If the forms of dancing and music are symptomatic of an
age, what shall be said of the universal craze to indulge in crude and
clumsy dancing to the vile discords of so-called "jazz" music? The cry
of the time is:

"On with the dance, let joy be" unrefined.

In the plastic arts, the laws of form and the criteria of beauty have
been swept aside by the futurists, cubists, vorticists, tactilists, and
other aesthetic Bolsheviki.

In poetry, where beauty of rhythm, melody of sound and nobility of
thought were once regarded as the true tests, we now have in freak forms
of poetry the exaltation of the grotesque and brutal. Hundreds of poets