No, the fault is not with the managers and producers, but with the playwrights. The latter, where they are not mere parrots, are cowards. Young and old, new and experienced, talented and talentless alike, they are in the mass so many _Saturday Evening Post_ souls, alone dreaming of and intent upon achieving a sufficient financial gain to transmute the Ford into a Rolls-Royce and the Hudson Bay seal collar into Russian sable. A baby cannot be nourished and developed physically upon water; a theatrical public, for all its potential willingness, cannot be developed aesthetically upon a diet of snide writing. In the American theatre of the present time there are not more than two, or at most three, playwrights out of all the hundreds, who retain in their hearts a determined and uncorrupted purpose. Take away young O’Neill, and give a bit of ground to Miss Rita Wellman (whose accomplishment is still too vague for fixed appraisal), and there is next to nothing left. Flashes of talent, yes, but only flashes. Craven’s “Too Many Cooks” and “The First Year” are observant, highly skilful depictions of the American scene, but they are dramatic literature only in the degree that “Main Street” and “This Side of Paradise” are literature. With the extraordinary “Papa,” Miss Zoë Akins gave up and surrendered--at least temporarily--to the box-office skull and cross-bones. Until Tarkington proves that “Clarence” was not a happy accident in the long and unbroken line of “Up from Nowhere,” “Mister Antonio,” “The Country Cousin,” “The Alan from Home,” “Cameo Kirby,” “Your Humble Servant,” “Springtime,” “Getting a Polish,” “The Gibson Upright,” and “Poldekin,” we shall have to hold up our decision on him. George Ade, the great promise of authentic American drama, is no more; he pulled in his oars, alas, in mid-stream. Joseph Medill Patterson, an honest dramatist, fell through the bridge while not yet half way across. The rest? Well, the rest are the Augustus Thomases, left-overs from the last generation, proficient technicians with empty heads, or youngsters still dramatically wet behind the ears. The rest of the rest? Ticket salesmen.