Indeed they appear inebriated to these antics by much the same real love of virtue which incites a portion of their congeners to burn an unruly negro as a torch to illumine their reprehension of lawlessness; and drives yet others to express their disfavor of intemperance by decreeing that wine is a compound too atrocious to be employed for any purpose except to symbolize the blood of Christ. In the face of so many laudable intentions thus obscurely communicated, we can but deduce, I am afraid, that whenever stupidity and high morals pig together they beget an offspring doubly cursed with zealotry and toxic aphasia. Nor, of course, does it appear quite unblasphemous to contend against these presumably ordained phenomena. At all events, those who believe the artist has any "rights" are in the negligible minority. I hardly need to explain why the bashaws of such orgiastic societies have embattled back of them the complacent muddle-headedness of that "solid" upper middle-class which pays pew-rent, and which from the first has rather fretfully resented any talk about æsthetics. Dr. Paul E. More,[6] in one of the letters relative to the _Jurgen_ imbroglio, has nicely summed up this popular point of view: "I am not at all in sympathy with a group of writers who would take any protest against the Society as a justification of what they are pleased to call art. The harm done by the Society seems to me very slight, whereas the harm done by the self-styled artist may be very great." Now that is really the popular and, therefore, the most exalted moral attitude. For the morality of a republic is, after all, a matter of elementary arithmetic: and one counts the ballots (sometimes, here and there, it is said, quite honestly) in order to distinguish between right and wrong, because the voice of the people is notoriously the voice of God. And time and again this divine orality has proclaimed that the American peerage of nature's noblemen does not want to be bothered with any nonsense about literature and art: for the reasons, first, that such fripperies play no part in honest poll-tax-payers' lives; and, second, that in very much the manner of this Dr. More, our reputable citizenry--obscurely and inarticulately, but none the less genuinely,--resents the impudence of "self-styled artists" who presume to know more than their betters about "what they are pleased to call art."