life in the unwholesome ways we have indicated.  Since morality is that way of life that gives it its greatest worth, indulgence in art at the expense of morality is seizing an immediate but lesser good at the expense of an ultimately greater good.  Practically, however, the censorship of art is the most delicate of matters, because the influence of the same work of art on one person may be widely different from its effect upon another.  A play or a picture that pleases or even inspires one spectator may be disastrous to his neighbor.  And it is always difficult to decide between the claims of an immediate good and the warnings of dangers that may lurk therein.  But we universally acknowledge the duty of some censorship, by prohibiting the most openly tempting pictures, plays, and literature.  And there can be no doubt that this supervision should be carried further than it now is.

The most pressing contemporary problem is that concerning the stage. [Footnote:  See J. Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, chap.  IV.  P. MacKaye, The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure.  H. Munsterberg, Psychology and Social Sanity, pp. 27-43.  J. H. Coffin, The Socialized Conscience, pp. 130-41.  Outlook, vol. 92, p. 110; vol. 101, p. 492; vol. 107, p. 412.  Atlantic Monthly, vol. 89, p. 497; vol. 107, p. 350.] Any number of boys and girls owe their undoing to the influences of the theater.  No other form of art now tolerated so frequently overstimulates the sex instinct.  The scant costumes permitted, with their conscious endeavor to reveal the feminine form as alluringly as possible, the voluptuous dances and ballets, the jokes, stories, and suggestive gestures, and often the low moral tone of the play, making light of sacred matters and encouraging lax ideas on sex relations, are powerful excitants.  Many theaters frankly pander to the desire for such stimulation; and they are crowded.  For while human nature remains as it is, the young will flock whither they can find sex excitement.  Scarcely less dangerous are the magazines and books that by their pictures and their stories play up to this eternal instinct.  Even painters in oils often use this drawing card; the Paris salons have always a considerable sprinkling of nudes, in all sorts of voluptuous attitudes, making a frank appeal to desire.  French literature abounds in books, some of great literary merit, that exploit this aspect of human nature; but in every tongue there are the Boccaccios and the Byrons.

Plato found this problem in planning his ideal republic, and decreed that all voluptuous and tempting art must be banished.  We are rightly unwilling to sacrifice beauty and enjoyment to so great an extent; such Puritanism inevitably provokes reaction, besides sadly impoverishing life.  The feminine form, at its best, is exquisitely lovely; and a perfect nude is one of the most beautiful things in the world. [Footnote:  On the moral problem of the nude in art, see Atlantic Monthly, vol. 88, pp. 286, 858.] How we shall retain this beauty to enrich our lives while avoiding the overstimulation of an already dangerously dominant instinct, is a problem whose gravity we can but indicate without presuming to offer a satisfactory solution.