This view of Providence in human affairs makes turning on Providence a less heinous offence than the phrase suggests to some with minds in pawn; and there are always some idealists ready to oppose human nature itself, in rash dreams of the conquest of life for love and beauty and the spirit. It is not the eternal witchery and potency of the Harlot I wish to emphasize in this place, for that needs no argument, but the fact that with the progress of modern democracy this ancient institution, hitherto confined within the limits of civic life, the court and political affairs, has suddenly loomed up as the one great overshadowing fact and potency of human existence. And so in spite of my parade of common sense and sanity I may be held to be an impossible idealist in many quarters, for I am opposing my own individual tastes and those of a small minority, to the overwhelming tide of human nature. I find the reign of the Harlot irksome--especially in the distractions of literature and the theatre. Some sort of parity has hitherto been maintained, for a period of historical development, between human nature in its unbridled enjoyment of sensation, and those concerns of the intellectual life, which have been the occupation and solace of the few, to whom the pleasures of artifice have grown more necessary than those of sense, and, in moments of clearness and calm, dearer than life itself. With the progress of modern democracy, ordinary human nature has sought factitious and unusual excitements, and plunged into a course of sophistication. It has insidiously encroached upon this realm of artificial delights of the intellect, which the aliens of the race have painfully wrested from life and nature. The Harlot astride Pegasus is the end of popular education.