He thereby caused the celestial authorities much embarrassment.

This embarrassment arose out of the theological problem of how it might be possible to remit the sins of a race which had never yet sinned-never, in fact, as yet been capable of sinning.

A sort of convention of the saints was called, and France's report of the alleged doings of that heavenly assemblage, with its bickerings, its suggestions, arguments and counter-arguments, is not altogether unlike an Examiner reporter's write-up of a stormy session of the Board of Supervisors, with Andy Gallagher and "Jemmet" in full swing.

The problem was finally solved by the suggestion of one of the saints-I forget which one-that the penguins be turned into men and given a chance to accumulate a few sins (in order that said heavenly authorities might have a chance of fulfilling their contract to remit the penguins' iniquities).

This was accordingly done, and for once the Prince of Darkness fell in with heavenly designs by undertaking the promotion of sin among the penguins.

When the penguins were turned into men, they, of course, lost their feathers, and went about clad rather airily, considering the probable climate of their island, which France places near the pole.

Up to the time that Satan got busy, the female human penguin meant just as much to the male human penguin, as she had meant when they were both mere birds-just that much and no more.

Such a state of affairs did not suit Satanic purposes.

-

His very first activity on the island, according to France, was to catch a poor naked unsophisticated - and awkward female penguin and teach her the art of dress, that is to say, of covering her form in a manner to call attention to, and enhance (or create) its charms.

The point of all which is that the origin and everlasting source of all unhealthy sex mysticism and over-emphasis is in clothes. That lasciviousness and overlust is based more upon a lack of knowledge and appreciation of the beauties of the human form than it is upon the pres

ence of that knowledge.

This observation is not original with the writer - nor did it originate with France. It is an ancient, although sometimes imperfectly recognized truth.

To tell the truth, sex and sex allure is the most over advertised commodity on earth.

Sex, love, marriage, et cetera, have been press-agented by every poet from Homer and Omar to Amy Lowell and Witter Bynner-that is, of course, if it is admitted that all four are poets - by every dramatist from Euripides and Shakespeare to George Cohan and David Belasco with the same provisionary condition, of course.

Sculptors, painters, novelists, musicians, newspaper reporters-in short, all the world's literature and all the world's art, good, bad and indifferent, have devoted their efforts to the creation of an illusion and emphasis which, to tell the truth, the subject doesn't merit.

Such people as Ellen Key and Havelock Ellis, who pretend to strip away the veil, don't do anything of the sort. They have merely found a new way of singing the song and telling the story. They draw the curtain well enough, but only to discover to us an artificial stage setting-perhaps new and original in design and plan, but unreality, nevertheless.

And of all the press-agents of sex, the priests and the purists, the preachers and moralists have been the most efficient.

If sin and sinful women, for instance, were only just one-half as alluring and charming in reality as the oldtime sunday school teacher used to make out, how much more joyful a place this old world would be! But the wild, wild women are so sadly tame after all!

One of the most baffling and confusing things in life is not only that love and marriage, but that sin, "sweet sin," itself, as experiences, never come up to anything like the reputation given them.

Not only is the bliss and joy that is claimed, missing from the actuality, but the very deep agony and torment of which the poets sing, exist mainly in their songs.

The queer thing is that although prac

tically the whole of every generation finds this out before they die, it never gets through the thick heads of the next succeeding generation. You'd think they'd guess sometime-but they don't.

Of course it is a good thing they don't, conceding that the human race is worthy of perpetuation.

But there is a point, and here is the crux of the discussion, where all this razzle-dazzle about sex subjects ceases to be desirable of a matter of race utility, and becomes the source of anti-social evils that threaten the very life of the race. It is hard for the most subtle moralist to place and define this point in words, but instinct and common sense recognize the "limit."

In creating this age-old glamor, the dressmakers, modistes, and corsettieres, have been merely the tools and accomplices of the priests and the poets, but they have been such a help! They have carried the light into regions where the influence of neither priest nor poet existed, and they have helped wonderfully to tie up the tradition and literature of the subject to every day actuality. Their talent for making a drape of cloth tell a clever lie has covered what a multitude of sins of society against the health and beauty of the race! They have clothed generation after generation of defectives that the illusion might not die, and if their clothing tended to make each generation more defective, they grew still more skillful in covering the faults they helped to create, and finally how often they succeeded perverting taste until these very defects could be emphasized for the same purpose, that is just as points of beauty had once been emphasized.

Witness the recent rage for the "debutante slouch," whereby a rickety, anaemic female with a spine curved like the letter C was supposed to create pleasurable sensations in the breast of the tired business man, when the Venus de Milo could she become perfect flesh before his eyes, would have left him unmoved.

It is gladly admitted that dressmakers are necessary. Besides the need of protecting our ridiculous bodies from the

heats and colds of the earth's unfriendly surface, there are few of us who are so beautiful that we would not welcome at times, at least, the comfort and protection of some clever modist's or tailor's lie. I can imagine there were times when Diana herself would have enjoyed "slumping down" under the protecting folds of some old worn "knock-about" mantle, safe from the strain of being beautiful. For even were we all blessed with the beauty of Venus and Apollo there would come times when we'd tire of posing.

And the wildest-eyed advocate of eugenics would not undertake to promise us, even if all his theories were adopted, that we could ever build up so perfect a race that a little occasional aid from an expert costumer would not be welcomed.

Turn back and read Mark Twain, when Mark becomes frank and tells the truth about the miserable, ignorant, bombastic, artificial and hypocritical '60's and '70's-those days when a woman's slippers were supposed to be mysteriously suspended from her hips, to fall just at the edge of her crinoline. That she might have legs was unimaginable, and along with the denial of the existence of these very useful limbs, went the denial of a number of other truths. Women were imagined, or said, in those days to be a number of things which women are not, never have been and never will be. Men, likewise, claimed certain qualities and attributes, which men never possessed and quite probably never had any real desire to possess. Upon such wrong hypotheses calculations were sure to go astray. So the generation abounded in all sorts of wasteful, grotesque, unjust and stupid customs.

It is not at all impossible that the Greeks reached such perfect heights of civilization simply because every Greek knew exactly just how a perfectly healthy, strong and excellent human body ought to be formed. And knowing this, he took an absolutely impersonal attitude toward the beauty of such a form.

This knowledge seems to be a sort of talisman, or a sort of corrective standard for thought, whereby any nation may