undeviatingly devoted to the production of nothing but the real thing, which will go its own way, year in, year out, quite without regard to the great public; and we shall never get it unless we can find some benevolent, public-spirited person or persons who will place it in a position of absolute security. If we could secure this endowment, that theatre would become in a very few years the most fashionable, if not the most popular, in London, and even the great public would go to it. Nor need such a theatre be expensive--as theatres go--for it is to the mind and not to the eye that it must appeal. A sufficient audience is there ready; what is lacking is the point of focus, a single-hearted and coherent devotion to the best, and the means to pursue that ideal without extravagance but without halting. Alas! in England, though people will endow or back almost anything else, they will not endow or back an art theatre. So much for the economic difficulty in Britain; what about America? The same cleavage obtains in public taste, of course, but numbers are so much larger, wealth will be so much greater, the spirit is so much more inquiring, the divisions so much less fast set, that I do not anticipate for America any block on the line. There will still be plenty of money to indulge every taste. Art, and especially, perhaps, dramatic art, which of all is most dependent on a favourable economic condition, will gravitate towards America, which may well become in the next ten years not only the mother, but the foster-mother, of the best Anglo-Saxon drama. My next reason for thinking that sincerity in art will have a better chance with Americans than in Britain in the coming years is psychological. They are so young a nation, we are so old; world-quakes to them are such an adventure, to us a nerve-racking, if not a health-shattering event. They will take this war in their stride, we have had to climb laboriously over it. They will be left buoyant; we, with the rest of Europe, are bound to lie for long years after in the trough of disillusionment. The national mood with them will be more than ever that of inquiry and exploit. With us, unless I make a mistake, after a spurt of hedonism--a going on the spree--there will be lassitude. Every European country has been overtried in this hideous struggle, and Nature, with her principle of balance, is bound to take redress. For Americans the war, nationally speaking, will have been but a bracing of the muscles and nerves, a clearing of the skin and eyes. Such a mental and moral condition will promote in them a deeper philosophy and a more resolute facing of truth.