These facts are strikingly illustrated in the American law courts, where all small matters are managed on the lines of comedy, and all large matters on the lines of hot and lurid melodrama. The recent Thaw trial may be taken as a typical case in point, so far as melodrama is concerned. The speeches of counsel on both sides might have been written specially for the Adelphi Theatre, and every gesture of the rival declaimers would seem to have been modelled on the style of the adipose itinerant actor who plays “Othello” in penny gaffs. So far as the real stage is concerned, the Americans are to be credited with quite a number of startling innovations. They were the sole inventors of the Deadwood Dick kind of play, which involves the tooling on to the stage of an ancient and battered mail coach, accompanied by feats of unthinkable skill with the shooting irons. I believe, too, that they were the only begetters of the drama that has for its central attraction a real set-to between bona-fide bruisers, who fight with the gloves off and punish one another for all they are worth under American rules. Then, of course, I must not forget to mention the world-renowned “Tank Drama.” It appears that an American manager happened once upon a time to find himself in a second-hand galvanised iron store. Here he discovered an enormous iron tank which he found could be purchased for a song. In a fit of abstraction, and in pursuance of the American tendency to buy anything and everything that can be had dirt cheap, he purchased the tank. And having it on his hands and no particular use for it, he hired a dramatist to write a play around it. To this woolly genius a tank of course suggested water and high dives and swimmers, and before you could say hey, presto! Mr. Manager found himself in possession of a sensational, if somewhat humid, melodrama, the like of which had never before been seen on any road. The Tank Drama toured the States for years on end, to the approval and delight of American audiences, and for anything I know to the contrary, it is still running, the tank itself having by this time, no doubt, grown a little leaky. In England the public is familiar with melodramas in which the principal part is taken by steam-rollers, circular saws, fire-engines, and other pieces of mechanism. The Tank Drama, however, was the progenitor of them all. It was from the Americans, also, that we learnt to grace our melodramas with the presence on the stage of real live cows, racehorses, ducks and geese, faithful dogs, dancing bears, blue monkeys, and educated asses.