are allowing themselves to be eaten up with them. It is with the stimulation and exploitation that this chapter more especially deals. Natural appetite may be gross, may even be brutal, but in simple communities where each individual must rely on his own strength for his own livelihood, it tends to return to a norm which is that of health. Appetite, stimulated with every artifice of advertisement and allurement, exploited by every financial and commercial profiteer, becomes in crowded communities a gnawing ulcer, destroying bone and nerve and tissue, body and soul. To walk the streets and frequent the amusements of any great modern town—London or Vienna or Paris—is to find oneself in the midst of a perfect obsession of the lusts of the flesh. An enormous amount of what passes for art has no design but that of inciting appetite. Music halls and musical comedies, farces, picture-palaces, advertisement posters, repeat the same tedious, banal, hideous assaults. If you are incapable of responding, you are nauseated and bored beyond expression; but it is clear that the jaded nerves of many people can be whipped into response. There are many people who are so flaccid that they invariably succumb to the fixed idea. The profiteer knows this, and the idea is fixed by every device that capital can contrive.
Take the lust of alcoholism. What chance has the feeble will to escape its lure? Have we not given "The Trade" a solidarity which must be the envy of mere purveyors of necessities? (Mr.
