No one can turn his attention to the social state of the working class in England, and throughout the world, without discovering a host of motors active in the production of dire misery, and all the mental and moral degradation that follows in its train—a degradation which aggravates the misery, and reacts, as we have shown, on the upper classes. Nothing will more actively stay the progress of any mental degeneration which might be going on than the removal of the causes of the awful misery suffered by such an alarming proportion of civilized humanity. Nordau’s warning against mental decay and progression towards folly will, we hope, quicken, if not the higher emotions, at least the sense of self-preservation among the leading classes throughout the world. But it must be regretted that he, not only in his suggestion of remedies, but in many other parts of his work, displays a lack of logic and a want of clear perception as soon as he quits the narrow precincts of his special science and the teachings of his manifold authorities, and falls back on his own reasoning powers. Had he prevented his prejudices from colouring his views, and had he not sacrificed logic for brilliancy, his work would have been of no slight assistance to those who are helping on humanity in its staggering onward movement. CHAPTER XI _VIGOROUS AFFIRMATIONS_ It has come to our knowledge that a great number of people in this country who have read through the whole of Nordau’s bulky volume have carried away an impression far from pleasant. Indeed, there are few men or women in a country like England who might not, on some plea or another, come under the suspicion of mental degeneration, if all that Nordau says were, regardless of his contradictions, accepted as true. In this country education and morality are based entirely on religious principles, and most of the inhabitants are, either by faith or by dint of sincere philosophical inquiry, to some extent religionists. All these might think themselves included among those whom Nordau stigmatises as degenerates. There are also a great number who admire intensely Burne Jones, Rossetti, and many other painters of the same school, and all these have been told, with somewhat brutal frankness, that they are on the road to lunacy. The pieces of Ibsen have a great number of admirers who have welcomed with pleasure the additional intelligence and interest which he has infused into the drama, and who consequently have been pointed out as degenerate imbeciles.