First of all, it is necessary to understand that a novel or a play or any form of art is what we call an escape. To be sure, a good many plays of the year are not calculated to give anybody much of a start on the bloodhounds, but you understand what I mean. Take, for instance, the most humdrum person of your acquaintance and you will probably find that he is an inveterate patron of the moving pictures. Lacking romance in real life he gets it from watching Mary Pickford in the moonlight and seeing Douglas Fairbanks jump over gates. He himself will never be in the moonlight to any serious extent and he will jump no gates. The moving pictures will have amply satisfied his romantic cravings. The man in the theater or the man who reads a book identifies himself with one of the characters, hero or villain as the case may be, and while the spell is on he lives the life of the fictional character. Next morning he can punch the time clock with no regrets. An interesting thesis might be written on the question of just what bearing the eyebrows of Wallace Reid have upon the falling marriage rate in the United States, but that would require a great many statistics and a knowledge of cube root. Assuming then that art,--and for the purposes of this argument moving pictures and crook plays will be included under that heading,--takes the place of life for a great many people, what do we find about the pernicious effect of happy novels and plays upon the community in general? Simply that the man who is addicted to seeing plays and reading books in which everybody performs prodigies of virtue is not even going to the trouble of doing so much as one good deed a day on his own account. The man who went with me to see _Daddies_ a couple of seasons ago glowed with as complete a spirit of self-sacrifice as I have ever seen during all three acts of the play. He projected himself into the story and felt that he was actually patting little children on the head and adopting orphans and surprising them with Christmas gifts. On the way uptown he let me pay the fares and buy the newspapers as well. All his kindly impulses had been satisfied by seeing the play. He was very cross and gloomy for the rest of the week.