It is a sign that civilization has been spreading to find that in England and in America, men are beginning to adopt Continental ideas upon the subject of endowed theatres. The chaotic condition of the English stage has been very largely due to the fact that it has been nobody’s business to preserve the old recipes. If the public taste swings away from lyrical drama for a decade, lyrical drama goes by the board--the very models and old wig stands are thrown out of the window. In a few years, only a few old actors and playgoers will remember the lost delights that went with these trappings. A whole province of human happiness has been eaten up by the sea of oblivion--by that all-surrounding, ever-active ocean that gnaws away the outlying realms of the mind, and will eat us back to mere grunts and a sign language unless we value our inheritance of articulation. Without the support of schools of acting the present moment remains continually too important. Those whole classes of exquisite, beautiful things which go out of fashion and are thereafter all but irrecoverable, should be held before the public with as firm a hand as orchestral music has been held before it, and for the same reasons. We are always being told by theatrical people that the public taste will or will not support something. Does anybody inquire whether the American public likes Bach or Beethoven, or does anybody take advice of the press as to how the works of those masters shall be played? No. The best traditions are followed, the best performers obtained, and the effect upon the public mind is awaited with patience and with certainty. That is the way a State Theatre is run in Europe, and that is the way that a New Theatre should be run in America. With regard to music, we have adopted the Continental ideas easily, because we had no music of our own. But with regard to the drama we have certain crude ideas of our own, rooted in the existence of a domestic drama, and these ideas impede our progress. We have, for instance, a belief that because an audience is used to an inferior thing, therefore it will continue to prefer that thing to something better and that the reformer should content himself with giving the public only a taste now and then of something fine, and should keep in touch with them in the meantime through concessions to popular taste. This would be sound reasoning in the mouth of the business manager of an ordinary theatrical venture; but in the mouth of the manager of an educational theatre, it is blasphemy. The thesis upon which all education rests is this: give the best, and it will supplant the less good.