In face of the fact that anti-semitic questions turn so entirely on prejudices and mistakes, one cannot surely accuse Wagner of madness because he sided with what may be called a national party, and approved of a movement the object of which was to stay the progressive influence of an alien race over the destiny of the Fatherland. In several places in his work Nordau insists upon considering the anarchist tendencies of our age as among the stigmata of degeneration. If he were right, we should be face to face with a calamity likely to end in the brutalization or the annihilation of our race. For Anarchism in some form of other is certainly spreading rapidly. That there is Anarchism and Anarchism seems of little importance to our alienist in his eagerness to draw his preconceived conclusions. He reasons as usual. Starting from the hypothesis that some of the criminal Anarchists were, to some extent, mentally deranged and morally weak, he arrives at the conclusion that Wagner was a degenerate, because he shared to some extent with the Anarchists the hatred of our present social system and of the injurious effects it produces on the masses of the people. Though Nordau dwells far more lengthily on poetry, and art, and cognate subjects than on the graver question of Anarchism, there is no point on which it behoves us better to set him and his readers right than that of the relation between Anarchism and degeneration. The Anarchist is not a cause. He is an effect. There is a feeling in the consciousness of almost every human being, be he a believer in a divine religion or in Nordau’s religion of humanity, that our race is destined to a high degree of development, and to a far larger sphere of happiness than now falls to the lot of most of us. This yearning for happiness, for elevation, is not only a feeling but a conviction consequent upon our knowledge of the past stages of the development of man. There was a time when fervent religious beliefs induced patience and resignation under suffering, and when our future destiny was left in the hands of Providence. But the French encyclopædists, and after them the modern scientists, have done their best to undermine this belief and to show us that the destiny of future generations will largely depend upon us and themselves, that science is placing in our hands an ever-growing control over the forces of nature, and that if humanity suffers it is because the present generation has not the moral courage to throw off religious scruples and boldly shape their own destiny.