a state of civilization is high or low, is of the utmost importance to men, and is at all times the chief object of the leaders of the State. Unfortunately, the word-like the word "Art"-is used to designate two distinct things: a Process and a Product. We will give our own, slowly-formulated, definition of the word, from the standpoint of—a process:

CIVILIZATION—AS A PROCESS-MEANS

A GETTING AWAY FROM

THE ANIMAL AND THE UGLY, AS FAR AS POSSIBLE, TOWARDS THE SPIRITUAL AND THE BEAUTIFUL-CONSISTENT WITH THE PRESERVATION AND THE PERFECTING OF THE RACE.

Civilization-as a product-is called a state, or a condition, of civilization, found among a certain people at a certain epoch. We will accept the definition of Guizot as to the meaning of Civilization, as a state of being,-which is as follows:

Civilization, therefore, in its most general idea, is an improved condition of man resulting from the establishment of social order in place of the individual independence and lawlessness of the savage or barbarous life. It may exist in various degrees: it is suspectible of continual progress.

Matthew Arnold said:

What is civilization? It is the Humanization of man in society, the satisfaction for him, in society, of the true law of human nature. That true law is, as we have said above, and we repeat here: a getting away from the animal and the ugly as far as possible, towards the spiritual and the beautiful-consistent with the preservation and the perfecting of the race.

Therefore, the ideal of every man, who has sufficiently evoluted to desire to progress towards perfection, is: to be shorn of as many of the attributes of the animals as possible.

We are all making progress towards an inevitable state of de-animalized, ennobled perfection.

But this progress is slow, because of our still imperfect social organization. There are, as yet, too many individuals who are too heavily weighted down with individualistic, carnal, or animal characteristics to permit the whole of mankind to progress faster. Another strange thing is: that not one man in a thousand thinks of the importance of the truth put, by that fine spirit, Renan, into his remark:

A complete civilization must take account of Art and Beauty, almost as much as of morality and of intellectual development.

And, right here, we wish to say-once for all-that, when

A remarkably well "constructed" figure. But, having been delib-
erately decapitated, hacked, and mutilated, it is proof of Rodin
having been tainted with tendencies to symbolic sadism in art.

BY RODIN.

WHAT IS IT?

From a photo, bought in a shop in Paris. A degrading specimen of symbolic sadism in art.

This atrocity, in plaster, was insolently exhibited in the "place of honor"-Rodin's special place-in the National Salon of Paris. A desecration of the world of art, an insult to the intelligence of mankind, and symbolic sadism in art incarnate.

we use the word "spiritual," we do not refer to christianity, or to churchianity, or any sort of religiosity, involving any sort of dogma. We refer simply to that which is antimaterialistic, anti-vulgar, anti-brutal, and anti-pornographic, in every degree. We mean the dis-carnalized nude, not the disgustingly naked; the refined, the idealized, the poetic; everything superior to the merely physical, or the coldly "intellectual"; everything capable of highly ecstacizing only the soul, or spirit. We mean that kind of beauty of which Congreve said:

There is something in true beauty which the vulgar cannot admire. But, if the so-called "radicals" in life failed to grasp the full import of the spiritual-as the most creative of all forces— how much more strange that so many men, in the 19th century, should have forgotten: that all Streams of Tendency, toward all sorts of license, unless controlled and checked, fatally broaden and deepen, until they end in disaster!

And how curious that so many, so-called, "leaders of thought," with more brilliancy of imagination than soundness of judgment, gifted with more "artistry" than wisdom, should have sprung up, to clutter the world of thought with brilliant lucubrations, in the so-called "belles-lettres": novels, stories, dramas, essays, poems, etc., all leaning towards pessimism and materialism, towards a sham paganism, of a kind which the finest Hellenic pagans would have repudiated with disgust; and who have flooded the world with sugar-coated intellectual poisons, all tending towards the slow but sure disintegration of society, and this by men and women arrogating to themselves the title: "Intelligentsia"!

So that the ugly fact, which now stares us in the face, is: the vast increase of degeneracy, among all classes, beginning with the artistic, and percolating down through all the strata of society.

With 4,500,000 morons in the land, who can neither read nor write, and, therefore, and above all cannot reason straight, however cunning in material matters they may appear; and who all the more easily become warped in their social point of view by watching the morbid examples, in conduct and art, held up to them by some of our "intelligentsia," whose immoral instruction they better-by doing worse; with these

reproducing unchecked and filling our jails with other and worse undiscriminating morons; with our asylums, in consequence, full of all sorts of victims of their own horrible, unnatural practices, of so many kinds that it is amazing; and with these physical and psychic diseases reflecting and manifesting themselves in all the arts, all the direct result of indifference to the spiritual and truly beautiful,—is it not high time that something should be very frankly said that may tend to open the eyes of the generous, but too busy, American public to the oncoming of the worst wave of social cholera: cumulative moral, physical, and political degeneration-ending in abnormal sex-perversion which destroyed once all-powerful Rome?

By sex-perversion we mean: first, all abnormal sex-indulgence; second, all unnatural sex-indulgence; third, all unpardonable adultery; fourth, all descriptions, or representations— in any of the arts-of the sex-relation, for the purpose of exciting the passions of the reader or of the beholder, be the motive money or notoriety. Oh, we know how easy it is to cry out: "Another Jeremiah!" It is easy to say: "We should worry!" Louis XV. also said, "After us the Deluge!" as a joke. It was witty, but proved, in the next generation, a precursing deathknell of the elegant, but posterity-despising, Bourbon aristocracy!

Natural, rational love: the holy union of a normal man and woman, with the fixed purpose of founding a home, and endowing the state with say, two or more strong, beautiful children, and raising them, to be able to serve, as both embellishments and bulwarks of the state, in peace or war, is the most sublime thing a man and woman can do on this earth. For it is imitating God in His highest function, which Solomon expressed in his immortal line, which we will often repeat: He hath made all things beautiful in His time!

It is creation in its highest sense, transcending all the art creations in the world.

When will American youths and maidens, when they arrive at maturity, engrave this thought on the tablets of their minds, in whatever form they might care to embody that thought? When will they see that the greatness and majesty of their country, in the future, depends entirely on the force