It is true that American novelists and playwrights are at one great disadvantage as compared with contemporary Continental writers. Owing to the public conscience, they are compelled to work in a limited field. The things that we leave to medical specialists and to alienists are staple subject-matter in high-class French and German fiction. In a European dictionary there is no such word as "reserve." French writers like Brieux protest that American conceptions of French morals are based on the reading of French books whose authors have no standing in Paris, and whose very names are unknown to their countrymen. But this protest fades before facts. The facts are that Parisian novelists and dramatists of the highest literary and social distinction, who are awarded national prizes, admitted to the French Academy, and who receive all sorts of public honours, write and publish books, which, if produced in the United States by an American, would bar him from the houses and from the society of many decent people, and might cause his arrest. At any rate, he would be regarded as a criminal rather than as a hero. I have in mind plays by Donnay, recently elected to the French Academy; plays by Capus, who stands high in public regard; novels by Regnier, who has received all sorts of honours. These men are certainly not fourth- and fifth-class writers; they are thoroughly representative of Parisian literary taste. Regnier has not hesitated to write, and the editors have not hesitated to accept, for the periodical _L'Illustration_, which goes into family circles everywhere, a novel that could not possibly be published in any respectable magazine in America. I do not say that Americans are one peg higher in morality than Frenchmen; it may be that we are hypocrites, and that the French are models of virtue; but the difference in moral tone between the average American play or novel and that produced in Paris is simply enormous.