An increasing moral strength is proved by the growth of the altruistic feeling, the devotion with which the cause of humanity, morality, and progress is served by people who, thanks to scientific scepticism, expect no reward in another world; the greater sincerity observable in all religious bodies, the magnitude of charitable institutions, the magnificent heroism displayed by captains and crews on sinking ships, by our life-boat men in attempting to save the shipwrecked, by our colliers’ efforts to rescue the victims of explosions, etc. The great victories of the Germans over the French and the complete success of the commanders’ daring tactics have been largely, and probably correctly, ascribed to the moral qualities of the German army, while the utter defeat of the French cannot be ascribed to the want of moral qualities, but to bad leadership. A quarter of a century has elapsed since the Franco-German war, but there is no reason to believe that the moral qualities of the German army have degenerated. That no degeneracy has taken place in the English, French, and Italian armies has been proved by the Chitral expedition, by the French war with Madagascar, and by the Italian operations in Africa. If, despite these manifest signs of growing intellectual power and moral strength, Nordau’s deep insight into psychological matters has revealed to him a mental degeneracy in the civilized world, his way of investigating such decay, his mode of dealing with it, and especially the causes he attributes to it, are too vacillating, too contradictory, and too biassed to inspire confidence. While sometimes, as in his chapter entitled “Etiology,” he refers to such causes as the increase in the consumption of spirits and tobacco, the factory system, overwork, overcrowding—all causes palpable to all who have given any attention to social questions,—in the rest of his book he seems to regard certain popular writers and artists as the great cause of general degeneration who should be specially noticed. This contradiction cannot be explained away on the plea that his book is only part of a wider investigation which has already been made, or might be made, regarding the causes of degeneration, and that, so long as his work is intended to treat of the influence of literature and art, his ignoring of other causes is legitimate. If an effect is first attributed to one cause and then to another, we may be sure that there is something wrong with the reasoning. We cannot prove first that the tendency to hysteria, so common in people engaged in a certain class of business, is due to overwork, and afterwards prove that the same tendency in the same people is due to Rossetti’s pictures or to Swinburne’s poems.