Englishmen are not less anxious than he to defend society against its enemies; but only the most inexperienced and illogical Englishman would recommend such remedies as our alienist seems to consider as the height of wisdom. Though we have been slow about it, we seem at last to have grasped the not very hidden truth that if society—that is to say, the people—is moral enough to elect an association capable of acting as an ethical censor over art and literature, we believe the people also capable of exercising that censorship directly, instead of indirectly through an association. This censorship by the people themselves has the immense advantage of working unostentatiously and silently, and without advertising the very work that should be suppressed. We think it futile to condemn, or even to suppress, a work; and on grounds of expediency only, regardless of principle, to club the sinning author. The source from which the condemned work sprang would yield more such works, and the circumstances which had produced the objectionable author would produce more objectionable authors. These, as well as their works, are the symptoms of a social malady, and we should treat them as such. We have ceased to apply to society the old methods, long since abandoned by the medical profession, of curing an evil by means of violent suppression of the symptoms—methods adhered to by Nordau with regard to society, but, let us hope, not with regard to his patients. We leave the symptoms alone: for they allow us to diagnose the evil, and we go for the causes. In looking for them, we try to keep our minds free from such prejudices as influence Nordau’s logic. We should not cry out for new ethical standards, for new and impossible moral authorities, while we ruthlessly destroy a standard and an authority—religion—the practical usefulness of which could not be replaced for centuries by any new standard or authority, even if invented now.