To the normal reader, of course, the fascination of such accounts is the fascination of repulsion, not of attraction. In attempting to explain the pornographic note in modern French literature, Professor Barrett Wendell makes a most ingenious suggestion that is not without its application to the present argument.[107] With the exception of a class forming a small part of the whole population, French family life is conspicuously pure. Why, then, asks Professor Wendell, should fathers and mothers who themselves practise every conjugal virtue delight in novels and dramas that dissect all the prurient phases of divorce, adultery, and sexual laxity? Simply because such topics take them out of themselves by presenting situations quite foreign to their experience and hence strikingly interesting. In some degree the same answer applies to American public interest in corrupt practices. The great mass of business and professional men, and of politicians as well, who sincerely attempt to live up to the best standards of their vocations nevertheless read and hear with avidity spicy accounts of the malpractices of their disreputable colleagues. Nor can this interest on their part be denounced as morbid so long as it leads not to palliation and imitation but to reprobation and efforts for the wiping out of abuses. Would the situation be really improved if instead of the daily grists presented to us by the newspapers we should read nothing but accounts of the straightforward methods which are employed in the great bulk of political, business, and professional transactions? The habit might be exemplary but it would certainly be supremely dull. While it is not true that all sin is news there would seem to be nothing to regret in the fact that neither are all virtues. Of the two the former undoubtedly has the greater news value. But the reason for this is that relative to the sum total of everyday transactions the more heinous offences against morals and law are to a high degree unusual. Virtue and ability, on the other hand, are so commonplace that it requires a most exceptional display of either to secure public notice. Considerable vogue has been enjoyed recently by the term “smokeless sin,” as applied to certain forms of social evil-doing which although large and dangerous are also so subtle and complicated that responsibility for them can easily be avoided.[108] Students of sin would do well to remember, however, that now as always virtue as a whole possesses the quality of smokelessness to a much more eminent degree than vice.