Page:About people (IA aboutpeople00well).pdf/167

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PERSONAL INFLUENCE.
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lications. The measures already undertaken for the suppression of this last cause cannot reach the immense number of books admitted into family and public reading, stories written by men and women, of which the trashy, vulgar tales of newspapers stand at one extreme and a "Romance of the Nineteenth Century" at the other. Nothing but the general deepening of morality and of purer literary taste will ever prevent the treatment of such subjects. It cannot be effected by force, only again by individual watchfulness over one's self as writer or reader, and over one's acquaintances as far as personal influence may extend.

The enumeration of these causes, which will doubtless be corrected or increased by the reader, is given simply to show that every one of them is such an accidental cause that society and humanity should in this day be ashamed of its existence. There is not one of them that cannot be slowly uprooted, if all are in earnest, and if there are homes whose inmates

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