It can hardly be that woman is merely a reproducer and not a creator. We have but to recall such creative artists as Charlotte and Emily Bronté, George Sand, George Eliot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Marie Bashkirtshev, Rosa Bonheur, Sophia Kovalevskaya and a host of others, to appreciate that woman has been a creative factor in literature, art and science. Not so in the drama, so far the stronghold exclusively of men. It is therefore an event for a woman to come to the fore who possesses such dramatic power, realistic grasp and artistic penetration as evidenced by Githa Sowerby. The circumstance is the more remarkable because Githa Sowerby is, according to her publishers, barely out of her teens; and though she be a genius, her exceptional maturity is a phenomenon rarely observed. Generally maturity comes only with experience and suffering. No one who has not felt the crushing weight of the Rutherford atmosphere could have painted such a vivid and life-like picture. The basic theme in "Rutherford and Son" is not novel. Turgenev, Ibsen and such lesser artists as Sudermann and Stanley Houghton have dealt with it: the chasm between the old and the young,--the tragic struggle of parents against their children, the one frantically holding on, the other recklessly letting go. But "Rutherford and Son" is more than that. It is a picture of the paralyzing effect of tradition and institutionalism on all human life, growth, and change. _John Rutherford_, the owner of the firm "Rutherford and Son," is possessed by the phantom of the past--the thing handed down to him by his father and which he must pass on to his son with undiminished luster; the thing that has turned his soul to iron and his heart to stone; the thing for the sake of which he has never known joy and because of which no one else must know joy,--"Rutherford and Son." The crushing weight of this inexorable monster on Rutherford and his children is significantly summed up by young John: _John._ Have you ever heard of Moloch? No.... Well, Moloch was a sort of a God ... some time ago, you know, before Dick and his kind came along. They built his image with an ugly head ten times the size of a real head, with great wheels instead of legs, and set him up in the middle of a great dirty town. And they thought him a very important person indeed, and made sacrifices to him ... human sacrifices ... to keep him going, you know. Out of every family they set aside one child to be an offering to him when it was big enough, and at last it became a sort of honor to be dedicated in this way, so much so, that the victims came themselves gladly to be crushed out of life under the great wheels. That was Moloch. _Janet._ Dedicated--we are dedicated--all of us--to Rutherfords'.