icit ways.
Practically all of his earnings after he was fourteen were spent in
this way to satisfy the insatiable desire to know of the great
adventures of the wide world which the more fortunate boy takes out in
reading Homer and Stevenson.

In talking with his mother, I was reminded of my experience one Sunday
afternoon in Russia when the employees of a large factory were seated
in an open-air theater, watching with breathless interest the
presentation of folk stories. I was told that troupes of actors went
from one manufacturing establishment to another presenting the simple
elements of history and literature to the illiterate employees. This
tendency to slake the thirst for adventure by viewing the drama is, of
course, but a blind and primitive effort in the direction of culture,
for "he who makes himself its vessel and bearer thereby acquires a
freedom from the blindness and soul poverty of daily existence."

It is partly in response to this need that more sophisticated young
people often go to the theater, hoping to find a clue to life's
perplexities. Many times the bewildered hero reminds one of Emerson's
description of Margaret Fuller, "I don't know where I am going, follow
me"; nevertheless, the stage is dealing with the moral themes in which
the public is most interested.

And while many young people go to the theater if only to see
represented, and to hear discussed, the themes which seem to them so
tragically important, there is no doubt that what they hear there,
flimsy and poor as it often is, easily becomes their actual moral
guide. In moments of moral crisis they turn to the sayings of the
hero who found himself in a similar plight. The sayings may not be
profound, but at least they are applicable to conduct. In the last few
years scores of plays have been put upon the stage whose titles might
be easily translated into proper headings for sociological lectures or
sermons, without including the plays of Ibsen, Shaw and Hauptmann,
which deal so directly with moral issues that the moralists themselves
wince under their teachings and declare them brutal. But it is this
very brutality which the over-refined and complicated city dwellers
often crave. Moral teaching has become so intricate, creeds so
metaphysical, that in a state of absolute reaction they demand
definite instruction for daily living. Their whole-hearted acceptance
of the teaching corroborates the statement recently made by an English
playwr