Nordau also thinks that the specialists in insanity should come out of their shells and publicly denounce the degenerate authors and artists. In England, for example, he thinks that Maudsley could exercise a healthy influence. But he would be surprised at the small number of people in England, outside the profession, who read works on mental disease. _Degeneration_ has been widely read; but this is because it levels startling accusations against well-known authors and artists, and because it purports to give a novel scientific interpretation of familiar phenomena, with the purpose of turning our opinions with regard to some branches of art and literature topsy-turvy. It is not to science alone that it owes its wide circulation, but to the clever—conscious or unconscious—sophistries it contains. English psychologists and specialists in insanity could not afford to launch out after the manner of Nordau. They might secure a certain number of readers; but they would lose their patients. A specialist who came before the public with Nordau’s artless and ill-considered scheme for the defence of society against its enemies, could not hope to be taken seriously by an English public. In England we have had a too large experience of books with a tendency, of log-rolling, of veiled advertisement, and of sly party thrusts, to be influenced by such a suggestion of lunacy against political opponents as is contained in the following sentence from Nordau: “A Maudsley in England, a Charcot, a Magnan in France, a Lombroso, a Tonnini in Italy, have brought to vast circles of people an understanding of the obscure phenomena in the life and the mind, and disseminated knowledge which would make it impossible in those countries for pronounced lunatics with the mania for persecution to gain an influence over hundreds of thousands of citizens.” It is impossible for us to imagine an English specialist in insanity attributing the absence of anti-semitism in England to his own writings, or those of other psychologists, as Nordau does in this sentence. If the German electors can believe such a wild party distortion, they are not the men we take them for. We have already explained the causes of the existence of anti-semitism in Germany, and of its absence in England. We do not expect that Nordau will acknowledge our view to be right. For had he not been so entirely the creature of prejudice on this, as on many other subjects outside his specialty, he would, unassisted, have discovered so obvious a truth.