Hit in the dramatist’s tenderest spot, we met and organized and from that day to this many of my hours have been given up to service to the authors’ societies. I was at that time the last president of the old Society of American Dramatists and Composers and a member of the Authors’ League. With the help of a handful of ardent spirits, I brought all the active dramatists of the day into the old society and merged it with the Authors’ League as the Dramatists’ Guild of the Authors’ League of America. A group of strong men and women came to the front and served faithfully on hundreds of committees and through long hours of conferences. Among the most active of these were Augustus Thomas, James Forbes, Gene Buck, Rupert Hughes, Channing Pollock, Edward Childs Carpenter, Percival Wilde, Rachel Crothers, Ann Crawford Flexner, Jules Goodman and Montague Glass; then later Arthur Richman, George Middleton and William Cary Duncan and a number of others. I remained as president of this group until I resigned to take up the presidency of the Authors’ League and gave, as all these others gave, a very considerable part of my life for many years. At present, thanks to our efforts, the dramatists are as well organized as the actors and like the actor eager at all times for a battle, but we are unfortunately quite without an adversary, one of the peculiar things about the manager being that he is unable to agree to anything whatever that any other manager thinks would be a good thing. At meetings of the managerial society one man will frequently say: “I don’t know what Mr. Blank wants to do about this problem, but anything he thinks I think different.” It is a truly tragic thing that the men who should be the leaders of the great institution that the American theater should be have been incapable of enough business foresight to bind themselves firmly together to protect their interests. Always we have been out-generaled by the motion picture men, bled white by the ticket speculator and discriminated against by the railroads, the labor unions, and even the newspapers, who are by rights our natural allies and our traditional friends. If the theater is the cultural and the educational force I have always claimed it was, surely it has a right to public loyalty and support and I must always think that, if we have in large part lost that support, it is because the dignity and the importance of the drama has been hidden by the lack of dignity and the lack of importance of many of our leaders.