Belasco, by obtruding harlots on the stage,--as he has not scrupled to do, in presenting to public observance _Zaza_ and _Laura Murdoch_,--follows many precedents and impliedly approves the exploitation of such persons,--unfortunate, pitiable, deplorable, sometimes amiable and gentle, more frequently hard, fierce, treacherous, and wicked. His published writings avow his views on this subject, and I have found his private assurances concurrent with his published writings. Those views do more credit to the kindness of his disposition than to the clarity of his thought. From his youth onward he has been deeply interested in aberrant women, studious of their aberrancy, solicitous for their rescue and reformation, charitable toward them, wishful to befriend them, and strenuous, when writing about them, to place them in the best possible light. “Whenever I rehearse a situation of passion, of crime, of wrongdoing” (so he writes), “I remember _the heart_. _I make an excuse_--seek out the _motive_, to put the actor in touch with the culprit’s _point of view_. The _excuse is always there_.” No form of reasoning could be more sophistical, more delusive, more mischievous. The _reason_ for sin, for crime, for wrongdoing, _is_ always there: but a broad distinction exists between the _reason_ and the _excuse_. Some persons, naturally good, nevertheless do wrong, commit crime, sin against themselves and against both moral law and social order, because they cannot help it, because they are weak and cannot resist temptation. Other persons commit crime knowingly, deliberately, intentionally, because they wish to do so, because they delight in doing so, and find their greatest possible gratification in acts of wickedness. Selfishness and greed are, in a vast number of cases, impervious to anything other than the operation of external forces painful to themselves: there are persons who possess no moral sense whatever. The notion that there is a substratum of goodness in every human being is one of the most flagrant delusions that ever entered the mind of sensible persons acquainted with the history of the world and aware of what is passing around them every hour. “I remember _the heart_” says Belasco: it would not be amiss to remember what was long ago said of that interesting organ by one of the wise prophets of his nation: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” It is in the highest degree creditable to Belasco as a man that he possesses a tenderly compassionate, humane spirit and has always practically acted on the impulse of it; neither wisdom nor justice is discernible in the “moral teaching” that he has liberated by his indiscriminate subservience to it in the instances I have named. PRODUCTION, AND CONTENTS, OF “ZAZA.”