He complains of "loss of time," "thankless task," "inefficiency," and the like. Now, I think that is grumbling without cause. Take my own case, for example. I have no problems of dramatic art to wrestle with, only the problem of coal consumption. But it is ultimately the same thing, i.e., energy. My friend mourns the shameful loss of energy incident to the production of a decent presentment of his dramatic conception. I, as an engineer, mourn over the hideous loss of coal incidental to the propulsion of the ship. The loss in his case, I suppose, is incalculable: in mine it is nearly seventy per cent. Think of it for a moment. The _Lusitania's_ furnaces consume one thousand tons of coal per day, seven hundred of which are, in all probability, lost in the inefficiency of the steam-engine as a prime mover. It runs through the whole of our life, my friend! Waste, waste, waste! What we call the perfect cycle, the conversion of energy into heat and heat into energy, cannot, in practice, be accomplished without loss. What may interest you still more is that we cannot, even in theory, calculate on no loss whatever in the progress of the cycle, and by this same "entropy loss," as we call it, some of our more reckless physicists foresee the running down of the great universe-machine some day, and so eliminating both plays and steam-engines from the problem altogether. But this is my point. Prodigious loss is the law of nature which she imposes both on artist and artisan. Indeed, artist and artisan have their reason of being in that loss, as I think you will admit. Again, history will corroborate my contention as to the catholicity of this loss. Imagine the French Revolution, the Lutheran Reformation, the "Catholic" Reaction, and the like, to be _revolutions_ of the vast human engine. Consider then the loss of power. Consider the impulse, the enormous impulse, applied to the piston, and then look at the result. What losses in leakages, in cooled enthusiasms, in friction-heat, in (pardon the ludicrous analogy) waste gases! Think, too, of the loss involved in unbalanced minds, as in unbalanced engines, one mass of bigoted inertia retarding another mass! Oh, my friend, my friend, you talk of "losses" as though you playwrights had a monopoly of it. Ask men of all trades, of all faiths, and they will give you, in their answers, increased knowledge of human life.