We are now prepared to inquire more closely into the specific sort of subject which the modern social drama imposes on the dramatist. The existence of any struggle between an individual and the conventions of society presupposes that the individual is unconventional. If the hero were in accord with society, there would be no conflict of contending forces: he must therefore be one of society's outlaws, or else there can be no play. In modern times, therefore, the serious drama has been forced to select as its leading figures men and women outcast and condemned by conventional society. It has dealt with courtesans (_La Dame Aux Camélias_), demi-mondaines (_Le Demi-Monde_), erring wives (_Frou-Frou_), women with a past (_The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_), free lovers (_The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith_), bastards (_Antony_; _Le Fils Naturel_), ex-convicts (_John Gabriel Borkman_), people with ideas in advance of their time (_Ghosts_), and a host of other characters that are usually considered dangerous to society. In order that the dramatic struggle might be tense, the dramatists have been forced to strengthen the cases of their characters so as to suggest that, perhaps, in the special situations cited, the outcasts were right and society was wrong. Of course it would be impossible to base a play upon the thesis that, in a given conflict between the individual and society, society was indisputably right and the individual indubitably wrong; because the essential element of struggle would be absent. Our modern dramatists, therefore, have been forced to deal with _exceptional_ outcasts of society,--outcasts with whom the audience might justly sympathise in their conflict with convention. The task of finding such justifiable outcasts has of necessity narrowed the subject-matter of the modern drama. It would be hard, for instance, to make out a good case against society for the robber, the murderer, the anarchist. But it is comparatively easy to make out a good case for a man and a woman involved in some sexual relation which brings upon them the censure of society but which seems in itself its own excuse for being. Our modern serious dramatists have been driven, therefore, in the great majority of cases, to deal almost exclusively with problems of sex.