so-called news in many of our daily papers consist of detailed reports
of crimes in all parts of the world, which are eagerly read by
hundreds of thousands, while our concert halls have to be filled with
dead-heads.

There is one more way in which music affects our moral life, to which
I wish to call attention, namely, through its value as a tonic. No
operatic manager has ever thought of advertising his performances as a
tonic, yet he might do so with more propriety than the patent medicine
venders whose grandiloquent advertisements take up so much space in
our newspapers. Plato, in the "Laws," says that "The Gods, pitying the
toils which our race is born to undergo, have appointed holy festivals
in which men rest from their labors." Lucentio, in "The Taming of the
Shrew," advances the same opinion in more definite and pungent terms:

"Preposterous ass! that never read so far
To know the cause why music was ordain'd!
Was it not to refresh the mind of man
After his studies, or his usual pain?"

There can be no doubt whatever that music has the most remarkable
effect, not only on our minds, but on our bodies. Physiologists tell
us that different kinds of mental activity are carried on in different
parts of the brain, and that, in order to recover from fatigue, we
need not rest altogether, but merely take up some other kind of work.
Hundreds of times I have found that, however much I may be fatigued by
a day's brain work, I can play all the evening, or attend a concert or
opera, without in the least adding to my fatigue. On the contrary, in
most cases it disappears altogether, the music acting on the mind as a
surf bath does on the body. Like many others, I have found that the