“...It was a strenuous, anxious time for me. I had so many things to think of and so much to do that sometimes I felt like that man in Dickens who tries to lift himself out of his difficulties by his own hair! I saw that I was to be forced to fight for my professional life--and I wasn’t ready. The public had been taught, season by season, to expect always more and more from the actor, the author, and, especially, the producer. The standard of production was so high that the theatre-goer looked not only for great acting but also for artistic perfection and beauty in the stage settings. The progressive manager was forced to invest immense sums in his stars and productions, and it was because I did this without hesitation that I was so unpopular with some of my contemporaries. According to them I “spoiled the public” because I looked _first_ to the artistic instead of to the commercial result.” Belasco had for several years prior to 1902 desired to present Mrs. Carter in a series of Shakespearean and classical plays which, as he wrote to me in that year, “have long been in her repertory but in which I have never yet had the opportunity of bringing her out.” Mrs. Carter was then the principal player under his management: it was both justice to her and sound business judgment for him to open his new theatre with a performance in which she was the star. It would indeed have been a brilliant achievement for him to have opened it with a superb revival of one of Shakespeare’s great plays. But, on the other hand, theatrical management,--although, rightly understood, it entails, first of all, a moral and intellectual obligation to the public,--is a venturesome business, not an altruistic amusement: Belasco had invested more than $98,000 in making his presentment of “Du Barry”: it, plainly, was necessary to earn with that drama at least the cost of producing it before he could bring forth Mrs. Carter in another play. And it was obvious that while he could impressively open his new theatre with a sumptuous revival of that popular success it could not advantageously hold the stage there for more than a month or two and that he must have another striking dramatic novelty ready in hand with which to follow the revival. Among the many plays which Belasco wrote and rewrote during the strolling days of his youth is a melodrama entitled “Il Carabiniere,” which he called “The Carbineer.” The scenes and characters of that old play are Italian. Belasco resolved to refashion it for the use of Blanche Bates. But the multifarious demands on his time and strength made it necessary for him to have assistance in performing this task, and remembering the success of Miss Bates in his Japanese tragedy of “Madame Butterfly” he altered his purpose and determined to base on the old Italian tale a romance of Japan, and he proposed to John Luther