would be morally the better for it? Just as a tendency to drunkenness
can best be combated by creating a taste for harmless light wines and
beer in place of coarse whiskey and gin, so a love of demoralizing
and degrading amusements can best be eradicated by educating the
poetic and musical sensibilities of the masses. Why are the lower
classes in Germany so much less brutal, degraded, and dangerous than
the same classes in England? Obviously, because, after their day's
labor, they do not drink poisonous liquor in a dirty den of crime, but
go to sip a few glasses of harmless beer in a garden while listening
to the merry sounds of music.

Men _will_ have, and _must_ have, their pleasures. Social reformers
and temperance agitators could not make a greater mistake than by
following the example of the Puritans and tabooing _all_ pleasures.
They ought to distinguish between those that have a tendency to excess
and vice, and those that are harmless and ennobling, encouraging the
latter in every possible way. And first among those that should be
encouraged is music, because it is always ennobling, and can be
enjoyed simultaneously by the greatest number. Its effect is well
described in Margaret Fuller's private journal: "I felt raised above
all care, all pain, all fear, and every taint of vulgarity was washed
out of the world." I think this is an extremely happy expression.
Female writers sometimes have a knack of getting at the heart of a
problem by instinct, more easily than men with their superior
reasoning powers. "Every taint of vulgarity washed out of the world by
music." That is precisely wherein the moral power of music lies; for
vulgarity is the twin sister of vice. It is criminal to commit a
murder; it is vulgar to gloat over the contagious details of it in
books and newspapers. But how rampant vulgarity still is, and how rare
æsthetic culture, is shown by the fact that two-thirds of the