This section opens amid a furore for improving the Drama in this country. Leagues have sprung up, with imposing committees of enormous length, and are canvassing for money and members with considerable success. A Conference of the Theatre, lasting a fortnight, was held in the summer at Stratford-upon-Avon for the first time in history, at which actors, dramatic critics, trade unionists, authors, publishers, newspaper proprietors, theatrical managers, voice trainers, poets, scenic artists, school teachers, clergymen, and one bishop expressed day after day their intense determination to have more drama and better drama than we have ever had in England before. This assemblage of people, whom as one of them I may perhaps be permitted to call without offence fanatics, may have appeared to the detached onlooker to have been of very little use. The Conference melted away, leaving the British Drama League and the Arts League of Service still without sufficient money to do any of the practical things without which the gathering of conferences and the sitting of committees are merely occasions for the ventilation of private grievances. But the Conference could never have been held if there were not, widespread through the country, a genuine passion for the theatre far more extensive and far stronger than it had ever been in England during the whole of the nineteenth century. There are no statistics available to give us the percentage of the population who were regular theatre-goers during the last century, but it was certainly very small, and everyone knows that it has increased enormously during the last ten years, and has probably even doubled again during the war. This is a fact which is generally overlooked, but which really provides us with the soundest basis for hope. What is the matter with the theatre in England is mainly that there is not enough of it. Nearly all its faults and shortcomings may be put down to deficiencies of _matériel_, both structural and human. _There are not enough theatres_, those in existence are obsolete, cranky, ill-ventilated, absurdly constructed, badly placed buildings, an eyesore to passers-by, a hell of discomfort for 90 per cent. of the audience, a death-trap for actors. Only a fanatical human passion for the theatre could drive people into such places away from the comparative comfort of their own firesides. _There are not enough actors_, and those that survive the barbaric tortures of rushing week by week from one cold and slatternly apartment-house to another, always arriving in their next provincial town on the dismallest of Sundays, generally find that they are the one spark of life in the place, and end, like Sir Henry Irving, by expiring in their miserable and draughty dressing-rooms. The English provincial town in its dreariness and dirt awaits the coming of the actor much as the Esquimaux in winter await the coming of the sun, but the actor during