Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/174

Counter-Currents the "Rake's Progress," and the " Harlot's Progress," were painted upon fans carried by young women. "English girls," said this sober essayist, "were thus, by way of warning, made familiar with subjects now wisely withheld from their consideration."

The pendulum has swung backward since 1876. Even Hogarth, who dealt for the most part with the robust simplicities of sin, would have little to teach the rising generation of 1916. Its sources of knowledge are manifold, and astoundingly explicit. Stories minutely describing houses of ill-fame, their furniture, their food, their barred windows, their perfumed air, and the men with melancholy eyes who visit them. Novels purporting to be candid and valuable studies of degeneracy and nymphomania. Plays and protests urging stock-farm methods of breeding the human race. Papers on venereal diseases scattered broadcast through the land. Comment upon those 158