It is probable that the far greater complexity of our music, the multiplication of instruments, the development of harmony, has brought out intellectual instincts unknown to them, and so obscured the moral questions once so striking. The Chinese of the present day, who have a music far simpler than ours, mostly on the tetratonic scale, are said to speak of the moral influence of music as the Greeks did, and to put the composing and circulating of tunes under a certain control. They used to have state composers charged with this duty, in order to preserve and improve the morals of the people. Although, then, it seems that the simpler the character of a national music, the more clearly its moral effects are perceived, we only want a closer analysis to detect the same qualities in our own composers. Much of the best music we now hear is unduly exciting: it feeds vain longings, indefinite desires, sensuous regrets; and were the evidence stated in detail, the sceptical reader might be convinced that here we are far behind the Greek educators, and that we often deliberately expose our children to great moral risk by inciting them to express their semi-conscious desires in affecting music. The majority who have no soul for music may be safe enough (though this is not certain); but those whose soul speaks through their fingers, or their voice, are running a very serious danger, of which there is not the least suspicion among modern educators. To seek corroboration from the characters of leading musicians were invidious, but not without instruction.[47] This inquiry is no digression which requires apology. It is a point in which we do not seem to have reflected as deeply as the ancients, and which is well worth discussing without pedantry or sentimentality. It is also true that the general aspect of this side of Greek education is more interesting and fruitful than the inquiry into the structures of the particular instruments they used--an antiquarian question very minutely discussed by learned historians of music, and by compilers of archæological lore. On these details we may here be brief. The subject has been exhausted by Mr. Chappell, our best historian of music.