It is foolishly supposed that this species of disorder, having gone to certain lengths, will at last return to rational limits. It is with some such notion that the enthusiasts, who profess to see in popular education a panacea for all evils, expatiate upon the future. This, however, is mere thoughtlessness. The development of the nervous temperament in the system of a nation is no remedy for this moral illness; on the contrary, the reverse is true. The result is the most dangerous form of sensuality. When an intense and excitable organism, quick in its intellectual movements, eager in its appreciation of beauty, is left to follow its own instincts in the application of wealth, we have the nearest approach to the ancient classic type of culture. The recent development of American art is a source of universal remark. Here the successful artist finds golden appreciation. The diva of the lyric stage, the painter and sculptor, meet with substantial welcome. The growing taste for beauty of line is well known and acknowledged. Extravagance in dress is becoming a national weakness. There is every indication that the next century will witness in our descendants a race more elegant in its tastes, more intense in its enjoyment of every form of beauty, than even the heirs of European refinement—a generation as unlike the ungainly type of Brother Jonathan as an Athenian of the age of Pericles was dissimilar to the rude Pelasgic fisherman of the Hellespont. We think of Greece most commonly in her æsthetic character and influence; but we must not forget that her immorality as recorded in history was hideously dark. The product of her sensuous and overwrought knowledge and enjoyment of nature spread with her literature and art. They brought death to the strong and vigorous race which had overcome the world. The annals of Suetonius and Tacitus, the calm records of current facts, are too obscene to bear circulation among ordinary readers of our day. The literature of their time has to be expurgated before it is fit to be perused by youthful students. The crimes which are charged by the apostle in his terrible invective against the heathen culture, which are rehearsed by Terence and Aristophanes, satirized by Juvenal, laughed at by Horace, celebrated in the flowing measures of Anacreon, Ovid, and Catullus, and coldly set down by historians as the public acts of the cultivated classes—these frightful excesses live to-day, with all their unnatural beastliness, in the exquisitely-wrought marbles and frescos of Pompeii.