If the theoscope may be expected to work so desirable moral changes in the man at the receiving instrument, what may we not hope as to its influence on the person before the transmitter? To be seen at last as one really is (according to one’s own belief) must necessarily be supremely gratifying to all who have known and bewailed the opacity of the glass through which they have hitherto been seen darkly. No longer doomed to chafe under the disability that forbids expression, our natures must expand to something nearly as great and good as that other self which we can send over the wire by merely touching a button. When a famous cartoonist had the justice to offset his weekly caricatures by representing his favorite victims once as they would have represented themselves he doubtless did something toward discrediting his own conceptions and justifying theirs. There are persons whom nothing will reform, but it would be possible to make a long list of “prominent citizens” who would be lifted to the breezy altitudes of a higher and better life by the consciousness, however erroneous, of the power so to present their true personalities that he who runs may read, instead of so that he who reads runs, as now. ACTORS AND ACTING I Was Sir Henry Irving a great actor? Possibly; there is abundant testimony, little evidence. The testimony of Englishmen is to be received with caution, for Irving was an Englishman; that of Americans with greater caution, for the same reason. The narrowest provincialism in the world is that of great cities, and London is the greatest city. What London says all England repeats; and America affirms it on oath. It is understood, as a matter of course, that in the judgment of England the best English actor, writer or artist is the best in the world. If one has conquered his way to the foremost place in the approval of a small London clique, not, in the case of an actor, exceeding a half-dozen men promoted to power by a process of selection with which ability has had nothing to do, one has conquered half the world. It would be easy to name the half-dozen who made Henry Irving’s fame and set it sailing o’er the seas with bellying canvas and flag apeak. On this side no one ever demanded the ship’s papers. This is Echoland, home of the ditto-maniac. We are freemen, but not bigoted ones.