ossing to those connected with it. Persons entitled
to speak have often said that to most of the people attached to the
stage the theatre is a little world apart, in which they are content to
live almost oblivious of the greater world around. It has been asserted
that during the last siege of Paris, whilst some of the players went out
and fought bravely, the majority were more concerned at the fate of the
stage than that of the city, and an actor of some eminence once bitterly
declared that the majority of his _confreres_ had no interest outside
the "shop" and never talked anything but "shop."

It may be that all classes of stage-folk are tarred with the same brush;
that these remarks concerning the actors apply to the managers, the
dramatists, and the critics. Moreover, there are certainly exceptions;
indeed, it is well known that several players of distinction take an
active part in civic life. At any rate, the fact remains that the stage
seems to concern itself very little with the improvements of social
life.

In a nebulous way the theatre plays with certain aspects of the
relations between the two sexes, but without seriously considering any
question of feasible reform. Upon one aspect which seemed to promise
matter for powerful drama we had only one important work--I refer to the
Deceased Wife's Sister question, which was handled in an able play by a
Mr Gatti, and presented at the Court Theatre. Miss Olga Nethersole acted
very powerfully in it. One would have thought that this and other
questions of legislation would have attracted the attention of
dramatists; they did at one time. The strenuous Charles Reade was
prodigious in his stage attacks upon bad laws, and effective as well. At
the present moment MM. Brieux and Paul Hervieux are flogging some of the
laws of France, and the German stage has seen a good many pieces which
before the word became demonetised one would have called Problem plays.

Looking back upon the English drama of the last twenty years one notices
as a curiosity that it is the woman rather than the man dramatist who
appreciates the utility of the stage as a means for seeking reform.
_Uncle Tom's Cabin_, one of the most tremendous law-changing influences
ever exercised by fiction, came from the pen of a woman, though it may
be that Mrs Beecher Stowe was not the author of any of the stage
versions presented over here. Taking a long jump from the sixties, one
finds that in modern times--indeed