Criticism in America must follow the bell-cow. The bell-cow is personal cowardice, artistic cowardice, neighbourhood cowardice, or the even cheaper cowardice of the daily and--to a much lesser degree--periodical press. Up to within a few years ago it was out of the question for a dramatic critic to write honestly of the productions of David Belasco and still keep his job. One of the leading New York evening newspapers peremptorily discharged its reviewer for daring to do so; another New York newspaper sternly instructed its reviewer not to make the same mistake twice under the penalty of being cashiered; a leading periodical packed off its reviewer for the offence. One of the most talented critics in New York was several years ago summarily discharged by the newspaper that employed him because he wrote an honest criticism of a very bad play by an obscure playwright named Jules Eckert Goodman. Another conscientious critic, daring mob opinion at about the same time--he wrote, as I recall, something to the effect that the late Charles Frohman’s productions were often very shoddy things--was charily transferred the next day to another post on the newspaper’s staff. I myself, ploughing my familiar modest critical course, have, indeed, been made not personally unaware of the native editorial horror of critical opinions which are not shared by the Night School curricula, the inmates of the Actors’ Home, the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith, the United Commercial Travelers of America, and the Moose. Some years ago, a criticism of Hall Caine and of his play “Margaret Schiller,” which ventured the opinion that the M. Caine was perhaps not one of the greatest of modern geniuses, so frightened the editors of the Philadelphia _North American_ and the Cleveland _Leader_ that I doubt they have yet recovered from the fear of the consequences of printing the review.