The reason why foreigners do not entertain at dinner is because they have found other and more satisfactory ways of spending their money. This leaves people abroad with a number of evenings on their hands, unoccupied hours that are generally passed at the theatre. Only the other day a diplomatist said to me, “I am surprised to see how small a place the theatre occupies in your thoughts and conversation. With us it is the pivot around which life revolves.” From one cause or another, not only the wealthy, but the thoughtful and cultivated among us, go less each year to the theatre. The abstinence of this class is the most significant, for well-read, refined, fastidious citizens are the pride of a community, and their influence for good is far-reaching. Of this élite New York has more than its share, but you will not meet them at the play, unless Duse or Jefferson, Bernhardt or Coquelin is performing. The best only tempts such minds. It was by the encouragement of this class that Booth was enabled to give _Hamlet_ one hundred consecutive evenings, and Fechter was induced to linger here and build a theatre. In comparison with the verdicts of such people, the opinions of fashionable sets are of little importance. The latter long ago gave up going to the play in New York, except during two short seasons, one in the autumn, “before things get going,” and again in the spring, after the season is over, before they flit abroad or to the country. During these periods “smart” people generally attend in bands called “theatre parties,” an infliction unknown outside of this country, an arrangement above all others calculated to bring the stage into contempt, as such parties seldom arrive before the middle of the second act, take ten minutes to get seated, and then chat gayly among themselves for the rest of the evening. The theatre, having ceased to form an integral part of our social life, has come to be the pastime of people with nothing better to do,—the floating population of our hotels, the shop-girl and her young man enjoying an evening out. The plays produced by the gentlemen who, I am told, control the stage in this country for the moment, are adapted to the requirements of an audience that, having no particular standard from which to judge the literary merits of a play, the training, accent, or talent of the actors, are perfectly contented so long as they are amused. To get a laugh, at any price, has become the ambition of most actors and the dream of managers. A young actress in a company that played an American translation of _Mme. Sans Gêne_ all over this continent asked me recently what I thought of their performance. I said I thought it “a burlesque of the original!” “If you thought it a burlesque here in town,” she answered, “it’s well you didn’t see us on the road. There was no monkey trick we would not play to raise a laugh.”