The American theatre and drama have long suffered from being slaves to the national hypocrisy. Only on rare occasions have they been successful in casting off the shackles, and then but momentarily. The pull against them is stubborn, strong. Cracking the black snake across their backs are a hundred padrones: newspapers trembling at the thought of offending their advertisers, religious orders poking their noses into what should not concern them, corrupt moral uplift organizations and lecherous anti-vice societies itching for the gauds of publicity, meddling college professors augmenting their humble wage by writing twenty-dollar articles on subjects they know nothing about for the Sunday supplements, ex-real estate reporters and divorcée interviewers become “dramatic critics,” notoriety seeking clergymen, snide producers trying to protect their snide enterprises from the dangers of the invasion of truth and beauty. Let a group of drama-loving and theatre-loving young men, resourceful, skilful, and successful, come upon the scene, as the Washington Square Players came, let them bring flashes of authentic dramatic art into their native theatre, and against them is promptly hurled the jealous irony of the Old Guard that is dead, but never surrenders. Let a young playwright like Zoë Akins write an admirable fantastic comedy (“Papa”), and against her are brought all the weapons of the morals-in-art mountebanks. Let a producer like Hopkins break away from the mantel-leaning histrionism and palm-pot investiture, and against him is brought up the curt dismissal of freakishness. The native theatre, for all the fact that it is on the way, is not yet ready for such things as demand a degree of civilization for receptive and remunerative appreciation. The “Pegs o’ My Heart” and “Pollyannas,” the “Turn to the Rights” and “Lightnin’s” still make millions, while the bulk of finer things languish and perish. I speak, remember, not of the theatre of one city, but of the theatre of the land. This theatre, considering it in so far as possible as a unit, is still not much above the Midway Plaisance, the honk-a-tonk, the Sunday School charade. That one, or maybe two, foreign national theatres may not be much better is no apology. Such foreign theatres--the French, say--are less national theatres than one-city theatres, for Paris is France. But the American theatre spreads from coast to coast. What it spreads, I have herein tried to suggest. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN ECONOMIC OPINION