TWENTY MINUTES AFTER. Here are the words, 1000 just; Ideas left out, as you implore, Makes prices double; but I trust Your sales will mount a million more. A LITTLE LATER. Herewith the pictures, full of fizz! But why on writers waste your type? Give us a chance and this pen-biz From off your pages we will wipe. --ADAM QUINCE. THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE HARLOT IN THE PASSING SHOW. I am well aware that the true lover of books is too wise to take a one idea’d bigot of a reformer to his cosy fireside. I therefore preface my observations under this somewhat alarming caption with an assurance that I am inspired by no visionary enthusiasm to turn aside the course of human nature. These few notes deal with certain superficial aspects of the general consciousness, as molded and modified by the social, civil and moral influences of our time. They show certain forces incident to the development of some measure of mental life in the mass. They are not made in any spirit of arrogant ascetism, or in the hope of radically mending the everyday morals of mankind by precept or persuasion. The morals of mankind are already under the care of a certain apostolic succession, that with great wisdom has substituted faith for morality as better suited to the constitution of human nature. These enlightened trustees of infallible revelation are ably reinforced by a great many reformers, and they need no support from profane literature. Indeed the professional moralists find extremely good picking in the widespread hallucination that presents morality in the fascinating form of a rabid curiosity about the doings of others. They rather resent scientific criticism, and I shall never intrench upon the workers in this field, alluring as are all impossible reforms to me, so long as there is any sort of following for common sense. But I think certain psychological forces at work in the swelter of this century-end are worthy of some sort of record; and at this moment I am thinking exclusively of American conditions and phases, which are the least likely to find an historian, and not of Max Nordau’s pictures of contemporary Europe.