These words, spoken by one of the principal characters, contain the essence of a new play, A Man’s Friends, written by Ernest Poole and recently presented in New York. Without moralizing on the need for a wider social consciousness, Mr. Poole seeks to show the limits of the average man’s circle of human loyalty and how far his loyalty to the whole people’s welfare is inhibited by his devotion to his own “crowd.” The play aims to point out that, however much our attention has been focused on graft in its great anti-social consequences, a larger factor in thwarting social progress is our restricted loyalty to groups which are less than the whole people. A district attorney fights a political machine which, through bribery, has defeated a new building code. He convicts the bribed alderman but cannot obtain from him any information as to the “men higher up.” At last he discovers that his own son-in-law was the go-between in the matter of the bribe. The intense loyalty of wife to husband is shown by his daughter who says to her father: “Your life and principles are nothing now—promise me you’ll keep Hal out of jail,” and by the wife of the guilty alderman who declares “it is not a question of right and wrong—it’s what I think of Nick.” The play brings out the loyalty to one’s circle of intimates, shown in the refusal of the convicted alderman to divulge incriminating information; and the loyalty to a political coterie whose watchword is “You might as well be dead as a squealer,” and concerning whom the district attorney says: “It is the unwritten law of your system to perjure yourself to save a friend.” He further remarks to the boss, “You won’t help those not in your crowd—and your crowd is too small, even though you can call a hundred thousand people in New York by their first names.” One element in the play is the definite human appraisal of just what graft and disloyalty to public welfare involve. It flashes out when the boss after telling how he had given a few dollars to a “down and outer” is silenced by the district attorney’s daughter who points out that he owns the gambling place in which the derelict lost his money. It is again emphasized when the district attorney says to those who appeal for leniency toward the men responsible for the defeat of the building code, “All right let’s be human,” and then refers to the 149 factory girls who lost their lives in a factory fire which the building code would have prevented. “People vote,” he says at another time, “with the man who laughs, but the laugh is too expensive.” How the district attorney shows his own human qualities in the end by saving his son-in-law from prison, but in a way to render important service to the 9,000,000 people of the state, is the climax of the piece.