n the presence of men. No doubt the illusions of love
would be little known, and passion would see a diminution of its
transports. But is it passion that in general ennobles human
affairs? We need honest attachments and delicate delights, and
all these we may obtain while still preserving our
common-sense.... Such nakedness would demand corresponding
institutions, strong and simple, and a great respect for those
conventions which belong to all times" (Senancour, _De l'Amour_,
vol. i, p. 314).

From that time onwards references to the value and desirability
of nakedness become more and more frequent in all civilized
countries, sometimes mingled with sarcastic allusions to the
false conventions we have inherited in this matter. Thus Thoreau
writes in his journal on June 12, 1852, as he looks at boys
bathing in the river: "The color of their bodies in the sun at a
distance is pleasing. I hear the sound of their sport borne over
the water. As yet we have not man in Nature. What a singular fact
for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his
note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under
the severest penalties."

Iwan Bloch, in Chapter VII of his _Sexual Life of Our Time_,
discusses this question of nakedness from the modern point of
view, and concludes: "A natural conception of nakedness: that is
the watchword of the future. All the hygienic, aesthetic, and
moral efforts of our time are pointing in that direction."

Stratz, as befits one who has worked so strenuously in the cause
of human health and beauty, admirably sets forth the stage which
we have now attained in this matter. After pointing out (_Die
Frauenkleidung_, third edition, 1904, p. 30) that, in opposition
to the pagan world which worshipped naked gods, Christianity
developed the idea that nakedness was merely sexual, and
therefore immoral, he proceeds: "But over all glimmered on the
heavenly heights of the Cross, the naked body of the Saviour.
Under that protection there has gradually disengaged itself from
the confusion of ideas a new transfigured form of nakedness made
free after long struggle. I would call this _artistic nakedness_,
for as it was immortalized by the old Greeks through art, so also
among us it has been awakened to new life by art. Artistic
nakedness is, in its nat