"This is just what one of the modern plays does for you. See, it seems to say, see, you crown of creation, what a crawling creature you are. Your past is what it ought not to have been. Your present is what it ought not to be. 'The future is but the past again, entered through another gate.' Yesterday you were a fool--to-morrow you will be a still greater one. Your best resolutions shall become bitter regrets. You are weak, and you make laws and build governments and create creeds, and they make you weaker yet. All the adornments of your civilization are relics of barbarism. Evolution is too slow for anything, and you cannot get ahead of yourself. You have talked all your life and not uttered an original thought. There have been a few original beings, but most of you are poor imitations--you must follow others. You must have a master, either in heaven, or on earth; you are a slave of society. You strike for freedom and anti-conventionality only when it becomes a fad. You don't understand. Your children cannot teach you anything. You are too old to learn. When you were young you had only your parents to instruct you. Your home rests upon false assumptions. It is a field of battle--or there are no strong individuals in it and all is peace. The theory of heredity is not true--your children are stupid; your wife is a doll, which you have chosen for her pretty cheeks, and, though she is fading, claims the rights of a free-born human being, and does not understand--but what's the use? Of what earthly good can such plays be? Why should we in this free, independent and prosperous country listen to such things? Besides, family quarrels, filial relations, disagreements between relatives are not fit materials for the dramatist. It is none of his business to meddle in such private matters. If there is trouble in the home, if a man and a woman find that one and one is two, if the interests of certain persons, or classes, are against those of others, if people find their religion too small for them and their laws not big enough, why there are courts that they can go to, and legislatures and clergymen and lawyers and Christian Scientists and so many other sources of help and salvation. For a writer it is extremely bad taste to deal with such matters. His mission is to amuse us, and he has no right to abdicate the sovereignty of his exalted office. "At least that is what we Americans--the majority of our people--think, and if there are writers among us so abnormally serious as to see things otherwise, there is but one thing to do with them--we should send them away to other countries where people like that kind of dreary drama.