Lack of a sense of proportion and distance is not peculiar, however, to Orientals. Even in the light of western civilization philosophers have forgotten yesterday and to-morrow, and the foreground has usurped the canvas. Impatience is a sign of modern degeneration if the oracle who has a caveat on that warning is good authority. It is strange to find in the prophet himself the fault he attributes to our time. For in all ages the world has been on the point of going to the dogs, according to some voice crying in the wilderness or on the house tops, as he is crying now. From Jonah warning luxurious Nineveh down to Max Simon Nordau listing crooked ears as the breeder counts his cross-billed chicks as proof that the race is “running out,” the warning has been unceasing. And yet the race lives, and builds on its ruins. Our nerves have worn us out, according to Mr. Nordau. If Count Tolstoi knows, amatory passion is the cause of the wreck, and high feeding back of that. If Mr. Ibsen is right, artificiality has destroyed the virtues. M. Zola is sure that bestiality has brought judgment upon at least one modern Sodom. Mynheer Maartens is Philistine enough to ascribe most of our ills to repression of sincerity, of naturalness in social life. And so a score of doctors describe special symptoms, each empirically, each truthfully. The wisest of them—those who have a sense of perspective—see beyond the immediate ailment the persistent vitality which is never wholly conquered. We have specialized philosophy and literature as we have medicine. These are not quacks who tell us the world is going to wreck through the extravagances of society, through the repression of humanities, through the lusts of gross living. They are students of particular phases of distemper. The world, not the men in its clinics, is to blame when it hails each as a cure-all. The realism of a Zola or a Nordau is not a finality. While the knife is in hand the ulcer is pre-eminently in evidence. Its removal is the business in order. But the genius of a Zola that divines the cancer in the vitals of society presupposes the life that is behind it—and that is the main factor in his surgery.