a gas-lit town. Almost the only kind of lights
which are not beautiful are those which are deliberately so. One has
to go out of the streets among the lights of the White City in order
to see beauty giving way to prettiness. Similarly, one might say that
the only kind of dresses which are not beautiful are those which are
deliberately so. Even among the poor there is more grace to be found
among mill-girls in their shawls than when on Sundays they dress
themselves up to look as like their dream of riches as possible. I
hope that the dress parades in the West End theatres and music-halls
will sooner or later be transferred to the poorer districts. They may
not at once kill envy and the respect for wealth. They may not strike
people as being so ridiculous as they really are, though anyone who
finds amusement in waxworks ought to get sufficient entertainment from
a dress parade. But if the show has not this effect, it may at least
open the eyes of the poor to the barbarous conditions in which the
rich live and fire them with the determination to hurry to the rescue
and release them from the gilded cage of their luxuries. The beginning
of the social revolution, I foresee, will be a rising against the
mannequins. It will be an infinitely greater event in history than the
taking of the Bastille.

V

THE HUMOURS OF MURDER

Almost everyone who has committed a murder knows that the business has
its tragic side. Whether it also has its comic side is a question that
has been raised since the production of Sir James Barrie's play, _The
Adored One_. This, as most people are aware, is a farce about a lady
who kills a man by pushing him out of a railway carriage because he
will not allow the window to be shut. Some of the critics have
protested that the theme is too grim for light entertainment. They
are, most of them, probably, lovers of fresh air, who foresee a new
danger in railway travel if women--creatures already enjoying the
possession of an extremely feeble moral sense--are taught to regard
the murder of a hygienic fellow-passenger as a laughing matter. Some
years ago, when _The Playboy of the Western World_ was first put on
the stage in Dublin, there were similar denunciations of the idea of
making a comedy of murder. It was then considered, however, that
nobody outside Ireland could take murder so seriously as to miss
seeing the joke of it. As a matter of fact, I believe the average
respectable man all the world