The authority of religion and the force of superstition, which for centuries kept the arts and literature somewhat remote from the common ideals and passions of the mass of men, have declined, and with their eclipse the ideals of the great mass of vulgar appetites have grown with social freedom and popular education, until, at this hour, we see the greatest tyranny of history established, of which the Triumphant Harlot is the head and front and fitting symbol. It is the pitiless despotism of the millions of uplifted, cruel, greedy maws that hold the fateful pence that decide every question of life and thought in this age of enlightenment. Every clod’s dirty penny or vote counts for as much as a head full of brains. It is a sublime spectacle. It is not the fact of the prosperity of the Harlot in democracy which is at all remarkable, for of course she has not depended upon societies or governments, but upon human nature for her queenship; it is the glorification of her arts and her power, in the open prostitution of the printing press in her honor and worship, the deification of her calling and character in the popular imagination, the dedication of the theatres solely to her exploitation, and the trafficking in her person and perversities, which is the stock in trade of the picture periodicals devoted to the edification of the millions--these things are not only maddening and nauseating, but they belong distinctly and peculiarly to this end of the century. It is a form of insane sex worship which is destitute of every vestige of glamor, of poetry, of real excuse in nature. It is a grotesque parody of all the beauty and dignity of human life. It is the grim and ironical ending of the emancipation of the appetites of the millions, in the thousand and one delusions of popular education. Ancient religions included the glorification of sex. But this is the exaltation of the lowest type of humanity--the sexless Pander to that grim disease of imagination which is peculiar to our hypocrisy of ascetic morality.