resses, almost like those of the poor. The carriages are
dark, like funeral cars, and the servants wear mourning livery.
Carnival no longer enlivens the streets. Every one goes about silently
and gravely."

Who could ever have persuaded the people of old times, who used to
preach against excessive vanity, that such a picture as this does not
represent a time of penance, but ordinary daily life?

These modern people, on their side, are far from thinking that they
are condemned to a life of suffering; on the contrary, they look back
with horror on the society of the past; they would never go back to
those days when men were enslaved by grand dresses and by rouge,
poisoning themselves with debauchery and dying of infectious diseases.
They have freed themselves from a great many useless bonds and have
realized a higher enjoyment of life. All the comfort which makes life
so delicious to-day would have been an incomprehensible secret to the
nobility of past centuries. It is the secret of life.

Possibly, at one time, monks and those who were living in the world
thought of each other in a similar way. Those who had renounced the
bondage of the world and all its vanities possessed a secret of life
which was full of hitherto unknown delights, and they looked with
horror upon the so-called pleasure of their century; while those
unconscious men who were slaves from the tops of their be-wigged heads
to their feet compressed in narrow boots, called the ways of death
"life and enjoyment."

Positive science has made yet another contribution penetrating
directly into the sphere of morality. By statistic methods of
sociology the social problems of immorality and crime have been opened
up, and external facts have been studied; and criminal anthropology
has revealed the "inferior types" who by hereditary taint are those
who have a predisposition to all the moral infection of their
surroundings. Morel's theories concerning degeneration and the
resulting theories of Lombroso concerning criminals have undoubtedly
brought light into this chaos, wherein opinion as to human goodness
and wickedness was divided. Forms of "degeneration" are chiefly rooted
in the nervous system, and all the abnormal personalities produced
thereby "deviate" from the ordinary type. They have a different
intelligence and different morality. False perceptions, false
reasoning, illusions, anomalies of the will such as impulses,
irresolutions, and crazes, the defici