The more general American theatrical taste, reflected perhaps most fairly in such things as the idiotic endorsements of the Drama League and the various “white lists” of the different religious organizations, is--for all the undeniable fact that it seems gradually to be improving--still in the playing-blocks and tin choo-choo-car stage. Satire, unless it be of the most obvious sort and approach easily assimilable burlesque, spells failure for a producer. A point of view that does not effect a compromise with sentimentality spells failure for a dramatist. Sex, save it be presented in terms of a seltzer-siphon, “Abendstern,” or the _Police Gazette_, spells failure for both. The leaders in the propagation of this low taste are not the American managers and producers, as is commonly maintained, but the American playwrights. During the seventeen years of my active critical interest in the theatre, I have not encountered a single honest piece of dramatic writing from an American hand that could not get a hearing--and an intelligent hearing--from one or another of these regularly abused managers and producers. And during these years I have, by virtue of my joint professional duties as critic and co-editor of a sympathetic literary periodical, read perhaps nine-tenths of the dramatic manuscripts which aspiring young America has confected. This young America, loud in its inveighing against the managers and producers, has in the space of time indicated produced very, very little that was worth producing, and that little has promptly found a market. A bad workman is always indignant. But I know of no good American play that either has not already been produced, or has not been bought for future production. Any good play by an American will find its producer readily enough. The first manager who read “Beyond the Horizon” bought it immediately he laid the manuscript down, and this, recall, was its professionally unknown author’s first three-act play. The American theatre has altered in this department; the last fifteen years have wrought a tonic change.