society people is French novels; that French customs, morals, and
manners (as portrayed in French fiction) have had an enormous effect
on the educated classes in Russia. If we may believe half the
testimony we hear,--I am not sure that we can,--Russian aristocratic
society is to-day the most corrupt in the world. There is an immense
contrast between Parisians and Russians, and the literature that would
not damage the morals of the former is deadly to the latter. The
spirit of mockery in the Parisian throws off the germs of their
theatre and their fiction. I have seen in a Parisian theatre men,
their wives, and their families laughing unrestrainedly at a piece,
that if exhibited before an American audience would simply disgust
some, and make others morbidly attentive. This kind of literature,
comic or tragic, disseminated as it everywhere is among impulsive and
passionate Russian readers, has been anything but morally healthful.
One might as rationally go about and poison wells. And the Russian
youth are sophisticated to a degree that seems to us almost startling.
In 1903, a newspaper in Russia sent out thousands of blanks to high
school boys and girls all over the country, to discover what books
constituted their favourite reading. Among native authors, Tolstoi was
first, closely followed by Gorki; among foreign writers, Guy de
Maupassant was the most popular! The constant reading of Maupassant by
boys and girls of fifteen and sixteen years, already emancipated from
the domination of religious ideas, can hardly be morally hygienic. And
to-day, in many families all over the Western world, Hygiene has taken
the place of God.

Russian novelists have given us again and again pictures of typical
society women who are thoroughly corrupt. We find them in historical
and in contemporary fiction. They are in "War and Peace," in "Anna
Karenina," in "Dead Souls," in "A House of Gentlefolk," and in the