already bringing about changes and sooner than most of you are yet ready to believe better days are coming. If, when they come, the men who have been the leaders of the commercial theater have learned their lesson, the temporary setback will have been worth what it has cost; if they haven’t, they will be forced to step aside and give up their power to those more worthy to possess it. The sane, simple and practical way to govern the theater has been pointed out. Three times already I have served on committees whose object was to consolidate the interests of actors, managers and authors, and hand over the authority to a group of twelve, made up from the men of proved integrity among the three groups. We who have made a long study of conditions know that this composite intelligence could find a way to correct the principal evils that have been the cause of our loss of public confidence and support. Those of the public who really prefer to go to the picture houses can of course continue to go to them. Wise men of the theater know that in the end the picture houses are great incubators engaged in hatching out new audiences for us and that in a very short space of time we could have a road circuit beside which the old Stair and Havlin houses couldn’t cast a shadow. There are, however, some very definite evils in the present state of the theater and every one of them could be corrected or greatly reduced. The regulation of the sale of tickets has been taken in hand by a progressive group of managers and will be corrected if the managers can be controlled, which is a bit like saying we could do away with evil if there was no more sin. The unfair and unwise demands of the unions of stage hands and musicians could be regulated by an honest facing of facts and a fair presentation of present conditions. No organization has the right, or as a matter of fact the power, to go beyond a clearly marked line; the moment any group’s demands become unfair there is very little difficulty in upsetting that group. It doesn’t demand an Alexander, it simply calls for a little common sense. No one of us really wants to kill the goose who lays the golden eggs. Help from the railroads would follow an intelligent presentation of our case. Clean theaters would promptly follow in the footsteps of a clean administration. Box office reform depends upon six words spoken by the right man with the right authority to back his six words up. Help from the newspapers does not depend, I am convinced, upon the spending of millions of dollars, but would follow an honest request for their assistance based upon the ground of the theater’s cultural and educational value, always provided that we could show some claim to cultural and educational importance.