Why should we be so serious and so violent in our attitude toward human vice? The root of the evil is in the weakness or wickedness of human nature. What is needed is to invigorate humanity with that moral strength which resists the inroads of vice. There are periods in the history of every nation when certain forms of vice are particularly flagrant. This was so when civilized Greece had lost her pristine manliness. It was so when pagan Rome was near her fall. It was so, unhappily, in England in the nineties of the last century, which saw the popularity of such literary and artistic decadents as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Wise reformers will not ever deceive themselves by thinking that they can eradicate vice. They will try to lessen vice by moral suasion and by removing the economic causes which are the promoters of evil living. To put wretched people into jail is not the best way to reform them. It is better to make them see that a life of virtue pays better than a life of vice. This may be a low utilitarian standard, but it will appeal to those who are altogether guided by considerations of profit or loss. * * * * * The alimentary canal of the business world needs a physic. It’s the same in business as with the human system, when things get clogged. We’ve been gorging the system of the business world until its tripe needs scraping. We’ve kept the hopper too full for a healthy elimination, and we need calomel and rhubarb for a change. Capital has allowed its cormorant-like propensities to assume the proportions of a boa constrictor in trying to swallow not only the calf but the whole herd. Labor, following closely in the wake of capital and profiting by its example, has pulled the bridle off of the horse and started it down the road of reason for a head-on collision with the captain of industry, who is stepping on the tail of his big Packard, and both will be injured. Cornering the earth and setting the price of all things required for man’s welfare has come home to roost in demands for wages double and treble what they used to be, and both capital and labor must be purged of this overload on the liver of righteousness or the undertaker will have an unusually thriving business very soon. The tendency of present-day writers and authors of fiction stories to deal in suggestiveness is perhaps explained in the popularity of the magazines which cater to these outpourings. Gouverneur Morris is one of these, and who can say that Mr. Morris is not one of the foremost writers of the day? In his latest masterpiece, “The Wild Goose,” which appeared recently in Hearst’s, he writes, for instance: One of the shoulder-straps of her night-gown had slipped so that Diana’s left breast was almost wholly bare. At her husband’s next words she hastily pulled the night-gown back into place, as she might have done if he had stepped suddenly into view.