Many of the producing managers are akin in type to the managers of the resident stock-companies, that is to say, they are sometimes actors, sometimes playwrights and sometimes men drawn from other callings by the lure of the theater. Most of the members of the syndicates are men of affairs, who have gone into the theater-business as they would go into any other business, mainly for their own profit; and their interest in the drama as an art is intermittent, whereas their interest in the theater as a business is incessant. Their attitude and their actions have called for sharply hostile criticism, summed up in the accusation that they have commercialized the theater. Now, all students of stage-history know that there has always been a commercial side to the theater, excepting in ancient Greece and in the Middle Ages, when the drama was more or less religious in its associations. In modern times we have ascertained that the drama cannot flourish as an art unless the theater prospers as a business. No art can survive unless it affords a fairly satisfactory living to those who devote themselves to it; and as the appeal of the drama is to the people as a whole it can never be independent of the takings at the door. Even in the few subsidized theaters of Europe, national or municipal, the grant in aid made by the government is never enough to support the enterprize. IV Commercialism in the theater is often bitterly denounced by young persons who conceive of art as ethereally detached from all financial considerations. The real question is not whether the theater is commercial, but whether it is unduly commercial, whether it has money-making for its chief aim, whether it is willing to sacrifice its artistic aspirations to the single purpose of making money. The theater was commercial, to a certain extent, in the time of Shakspere and Molière, of Sheridan and Beaumarchais; but it was not then unduly commercial. Is it unduly commercial now and here, to-day in the United States? Is its organization exclusively in the control of men who are thinking only of the profits to be made, and who know nothing and care less about the drama as an art?