So, instead of saying that Nature cares nothing about chastity, let us say that human nature, _our_ nature, cares about it a great deal. Let us say that, by her present popular literature, France gives proof that she is suffering from a dangerous and perhaps fatal disease; and that it is not clericalism which is the real enemy to the French so much as their goddess; and if they can none of them see this themselves, it is only a sign of how far the disease has gone, and the case is so much the worse. The case is so much the worse; and for men in such case to be so vehemently busy about clerical and dynastic intrigues at home, and about alliances and colonial acquisitions and purifications of the flag abroad, might well make one borrow of the prophets and exclaim, ‘Surely ye are perverse’! perverse to neglect your really pressing matters for those secondary ones. And when the ingenious and inexhaustible M. Blowitz, of our great London _Times_, who sees everybody and knows everything, when he expounds the springs of politics and the causes of the fall and success of ministries, and the combinations which have not been tried but should be, and takes upon him the mystery of things in the way with which we are so familiar,—to this wise man himself one is often tempted, again, to say with the prophets: ‘Yet the Eternal also is wise, and will not call back his words.’ M. Blowitz is not the only wise one; the Eternal has his wisdom also, and somehow or other it is always the Eternal’s wisdom which at last carries the day. The Eternal has attached to certain moral causes the safety or the ruin of States, and the present popular literature of France is a sign that she has a most dangerous moral disease.