If these are the "middle class," what is the next grade below? Where does he place the dividing line? Does he make no distinction between the vaudeville, continuous performance buffoons and the thousands who are "not stars," but working well and perhaps hoping? Does he call our scullery-maids and stable-boys "representative American middle class?" Does he call Mable Strickland and other dainty little hard-workers in minor parts typical of the hideous coarseness and vice he has described? Does he bracket THEM with his beer-drunk, easy-virtue "chorus-girls?" Does he realize all he means when he says of those he depicts "there were no stars among them, and none of the lower stratum?" Briefly, did he know what he was writing about? When a man sits down on a curb stone with his feet in the gutter to "study life" and imagines himself a philosopher, while he moralizes on the muddy feet that pass him, he would probably feel grieved if the strong hand of some clear-headed individual lifted him up out of the gutter's filth and he was informed that much depended upon one's view being from a level, not an incline. We do not Judge our middle-class citizens by our cooks, and it is apt to suggest unwisdom, to express it very mildly, to gauge the men and women workers of the stage by beer-hall habitues and fleshling courtesans. This an age of work and a generation of workers. The times, the conditions, the needs of the century are driving women out into the world as never before in the world's history. They must work to live and to help others live and in every line of work possible is woman found. The stage gives employment to thousands of women eminently fitted to entertain and amuse the public. Under ordinary conditions the great army of players find its lot a not unpleasant one. Women bears its harness lightly, to whom manual labor would be a mental and physical crucifixion. It is a labor of brain as well as body, of the soul as well as the senses, of the artistic as well as the prosaic. Its temptations are many and its pitfalls are many, but they are little, if any, more than are the temptations in many other fields of self-support for women. And notwithstanding the gentleman's profound deductions, there are a number of good women on the American stage even if they are not "given credit for being so by their fellow professionals"--and iconoclastic writers. And by these I do not mean the weary females described by Lizzie Annandale as reclining on the shoulders of their men companions, in mal-adorous day coaches on cross-continent "jumps." These women, if he will pardon the contradiction, are not the "representative middle class of the American stage." They are the scullery-maid class, for they are on the lowest rung of the professional ladder and few ever ascend from that lowest rung. It is their native element.