ts_, both
versions of Feuillet's drama _Montjoie_, and Mr Arthur Jones's clever
piece _A Rogue's Comedy_, and _Business is Business_, the adaptation of
_Les Affaires sont les Affaires_. Moreover, there was a melodrama given
at the Opera Comique which, despite the care of the Censor, contained
caricatures of several notorious living financiers. They were financiers
touching whom one may record the story, perhaps unpublished, of an
American who asserted vaingloriously that we have no great financiers in
England such as are to be found in the United States, and on being
answered that we have, and thereupon inquiring scornfully where they
could be found, received the curt reply, "In gaol." Unfortunately, the
finances of the Opera Comique production were almost as unsubstantial as
the finance in the other plays, and it did not last long.

Mr Cecil Raleigh also, in some of the Drury Lane dramas which used to
give us vast entertainment, handled company matters in a broad,
generous, comic fashion which baffled criticism.

Would a public so abominably engrossed as ours in money, a people that
is exchanging the ascendency of an aristocracy for the despotism of a
plutocracy, a nation a large proportion of which gambles on the Stock
Exchange whilst another plays bridge for shocking stakes, really reject
a drama turning on financial matters and containing a moderate amount of
accurate detail? If there is little poetry in Throgmorton Street, at
least there is plenty of romance, and more imagination is exhibited in
the average prospectus than in the ordinary play. It would not be
impossible to introduce a touch of sentiment, assuming, sadly, that the
playgoers cannot be happy without a little bit of sugar; whilst the
fierce clash of men in the mad pursuit for wealth--a pursuit, after all,
more engrossing than that of love--is often terribly dramatic. There was
a piece called _The Wheat King_, an adaptation of one of the few books
by the powerful American novelist Norris, who died too young. The
version, made by two ladies, very nearly fulfilled the conditions
suggested, and it almost achieved success.

Doubtless everybody connected with theatres believes that love in some
form or another is the only possible basis for a successful drama,
although we are well aware that romantic love such as the dramatists
trade in is only an episode in the lives of a minority of the nation,
and does not come at all to the rest. Apparently it is pres