When “The Man Inside” had been made ready for production Molineux was permitted to attend the dress rehearsal in New York, during the first act of which he was self-contained and quiet. But after the curtain had been lowered he became so violently excited and created so much disturbance that Belasco was constrained to order him to be taken out of the theatre. “It was hard to do, but it had to be done,” he writes; “I didn’t know whether to go on or drop the whole thing, and I really expected the man would break out and kill somebody.” Molineux’s unfortunate family and friends were, however, happily able to intervene and restrain him and no act of violence was committed. On November 7, 1914, he was placed in the King’s Park State Hospital, Long Island, and there he is still confined,--hopelessly insane. His brave, devoted old father, worn out and heart broken, died, June 10, 1915: his mother, a few months earlier. [Roland B. Molineux died, in the King’s Park State Hospital for the Insane, on November 2, 1917, of paresis. There is no doubt that he was a dangerous madman when first Belasco met him.--J. W.] _The Man Inside_ of Molineux’s play is, symbolically, Conscience; and the fundamental idea which it expounds is that Society errs in its treatment of criminals, because crime cannot be prevented by punishment but only by an effective appeal to the self-respecting moral nature and “better self” of the criminal,--who must first be taught to “think right” before he can be made to _do_ right. Sublime discovery! No intimation is made as to what method Society ought to employ in cases--unhappily numerous--of criminals who do not possess any “better selves” and who cannot by any means, not even the threat of death, be restrained from crimes which profit them or gratify their ruling passions. There was, without doubt, an honest altruistic purpose in the distempered, tortured mind of Molineux,--though, since he did not possess the power to elucidate it, there is no need to dwell upon the subject in this place. Belasco, having through kindness undertaken to produce an ill-digested, “talky” and undramatic play, revised it as well as possible in the circumstances, making of it a moderately effective melodrama, dealing with crime and injustice. In that melodrama a philanthropic young man, who is also an Assistant District Attorney of the City of New York, resorts to the haunts of criminals in order to ascertain, if possible, why they persist in crime in spite of efforts to reclaim them. He there becomes deeply interested in a girl named _Annie_, the daughter of a desperate forger known as _Red Mike_, and also he becomes so incensed at the viciousness and cruelty of some methods employed by the Police Department and officials from the District Attorney’s Office to insure convictions of accused criminals that he assists _Annie_ in the theft of a forged check, upon possession of which the fate of her father depends,--thus himself becoming party to