Politicians, sociologists, economists, biologists, theologians, and the æsthetes have had their say and have each in their turn exercised a periodical spell over the public mind. It is now the turn of the alienists. Dr. Max Nordau has by his book entitled _Degeneration_ produced no small sensation throughout the world, and not least in this country. Though his work may not have made the stir of a sensational novel read by the millions, there can be little doubt that it has imposed itself on every educated mind in the country. It is no exaggeration to say that, like a sharp trumpet-blast, it has awakened the educated classes from the lethargy consequent upon the din of clashing opinions and contradictory systems. This volume has once more roused us to the fact that we, as individuals, as a nation, as a race, are travelling at comet-speed towards a goal of which we have no inkling. It sternly suggests that we are on the wrong road and that a fate of a most horrible description is rapidly befalling us—an affliction in most people’s view worse than annihilation. Madness is shown to be insidiously invading our minds, and by its contagious nature threatening to prove Voltaire’s biting sarcasm a stern prophecy. It is no wonder that his work has become as it were a nightmare to millions of minds. If its diagnosis and its conclusions are as irrefutable as to most people they appear to be, we indeed live in a fool’s paradise: our leaders, our authorities, our men of genius, are not the beacons we have held them to be, but will-o’-the-wisps luring us into the bottomless quagmires of lunacy; the progression we vaunted is a slippery plane sliding us back to bestiality; our means for raising the masses are so many slashes at the bonds of moral order and decency, calculated to unloose the brutish Loke of modern democracy; unbridled animal appetites threaten to take the place of law and religion; all social order is being undermined; and the vilest instincts press for gratification in lust, rapine, and murder. With all the solemnity, moral persuasiveness, and scientific authority of a medical practitioner, Max Nordau tells us that a mortal disease is invading our race, and that with the end of the century the “dusk” of humanity begins.