"Journalists, in short," I said, "should live over Bemerton's." He grunted a short acknowledgment of my mild humour, and continued: "Every nation, according to Arnold, has the papers it deserves. That is true. The greater part of this nation, suffering just now from swelled head and swelled stomach and swelled pockets, has the paper it deserves. Cynicism and self-esteem run through everything. Christian of course we never were, and never shall be, not even in adversity; but we are no longer in the least afraid of God. We are getting nasty, too. We buy messy little indecent novels by the thousand, as far removed from honest British coarseness as the poles are asunder. We have given up respecting the Bible. "I will give you an instance of our new cynicism, our carelessness. The other day, at one of the large music halls, a dancer appeared nightly in nothing whatever but a skirt of beads, and capered as provocatively as she was able round a waxen head. The dancer affected to be Salome, the daughter of Herodias, while the waxen head was intended for that of the decapitated John the Baptist, the forerunner, if I remember aright, of our Lord. This in a London music hall! The exhibition rapidly became the rage, and several other halls, in the usual slavish imitative way, had their Salomes too. Every one went to see and applaud the principal one, including the Prime Minister, who subsequently, to mark his especial approval, entertained the lady at 10 Downing Street. So far as I could discover, I, who am a professed sceptic, was practically the only person in London whose feelings were outraged. I call the incident deplorably significant. "It seemed to me," Mr. Dabney continued, "sufficiently offensive that a sacred figure such as John the Baptist--a figure of peculiar sanctity to Christians--should be subjected to the indignity of taking part in a music-hall performance at all, amid knockabouts and comic singers and all the other seaminesses of those places; but it was far worse that English people of high position should flock to see it. For any head, you must see, would have done as well. The girl had to dance more or less naked to some waxwork property: that we will take for granted. Then why not the head, say, of Holofernes, who is only in the _Apocrypha_? The spectacle might then have drawn merely the Leader of the Opposition, but it should have served." Mr. Dabney smiled a ghastly smile as he made his final joke and paused for breath. "Were there no protests at all?" I asked. "There may have been a few," he said: "I was exaggerating a little; but very few. Where were they to appear? A press that lives largely by advertisements does not lightly advise people to stay away from places of entertainment. Do you know," he added, "that my paper is the only paper in London that does not take advertisements. So long as there are advertisements there cannot be absolutely free speech. It is not humanly possible.