Spice

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SPICE.—

It is a curious and not over favorable sign of the times that in our newspapers, novels, plays, and other exponents of the popular intellect, we are verging faster and faster upon the indecent, the libidinous, the spicy. “Our people must be cracked up, Sir,” says Mr. Chollop in “Martin Chuzzlewit.” Of late years it seems as if they must be spiced up by the most pungent of condiments, or nothing will go down with them. Look at the illustrated papers—at the weekly literary papers,—above all at the columns of the mostly widely circulated dailies, and say if the survey does not justify such a conclusion. Decency, or what was regarded as such, twenty years ago, is completely set at defiance. As the French say, “We have changed all that.”