_Constatons les faits_, if I may borrow another phrase from the French. Under what circumstances are we invited? When a play is doing good business? Certainly not. It is when the company are discussing in whispers whether the notice will go up or not, that the Fiery Cross is sent round to us and we come and fill the house. Without us there would be an aching void, and the few paying people, aghast at the gloom, would spread very bad reports. Managers, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Our presence saves the situation and the face of the management. No doubt our assistance is often vain, but the cases are numerous when, thanks to us, the management has been able to tide over a bad week or two during a run. "They also serve who only sit and watch" is our motto, taken, you will see, from a line by the "organ-mouthed voice of England." Would not _Dorothy_ have died young but for our intervention? Would not _The Lion and the Mouse_ have enjoyed the success it deserved if we had been called in to dress the house until the public had discovered the piece? Many are the cases where, during weeks of bad weather or sudden gloom we have rallied loyally to the theatre and kept a play going. Do services such as this count for nothing? Is my occupation to become like that of the Moor of Venice--merely because managers are forgetful? Do we make no sacrifices when we come to their aid? What about the expense of coming to and fro? What about wear and tear of dress clothes, useless to some of us except for such purposes, and, in honesty I should add, so far as the nether portions are concerned, for attending funerals? Let me discuss what is urged against us. It is said that if we did not get free tickets we should pay to visit the play. There is a little truth in this, but not much. We might take tickets for the pit to see the good plays; our judgment tells us they are but few, whereas a sense of duty compels us in our quasi-professional capacity to attend even the most deplorable rubbish. This aspect of the matter amounts to no more than a trifle. The managers would gain little from our occasional shillings and lose much by our frequent absence. It is urged that we do not applaud. I maintain that deceitful applause is not in our implied contract; certainly we never hiss or boo, though there is a splendid tradition rendered popular by poor Lal Brough that one of us found a play so utterly bad that he left his seat, went to the box-office, and bought a ticket, in order that he might express his opinion without prejudice to his conscience. As a body we are playgoers of judgment and experience, and, though I protest that we clap generously when there is a reasonable opportunity, the suggestion that we are a claque failing to do its duty because we do not applaud bad pieces is an outrageous insult.