that they were
upholding virtue instead of outraging it. They infected each other with
their hysteria until they were for all practical purposes indecently
mad. They finally forced the police to arrest Mr Daly and his company,
and led the magistrate to express his loathing of the duty thus forced
upon him of reading an unmentionable and abominable play. Of course the
convulsion soon exhausted itself. The magistrate, naturally somewhat
impatient when he found that what he had to read was a strenuously
ethical play forming part of a book which had been in circulation
unchallenged for eight years, and had been received without protest by
the whole London and New York press, gave the journalists a piece of his
mind as to their moral taste in plays. By consent, he passed the case
on to a higher court, which declared that the play was not immoral;
acquitted Mr Daly; and made an end of the attempt to use the law to
declare living women to be "ordure," and thus enforce silence as to
the far-reaching fact that you cannot cheapen women in the market for
industrial purposes without cheapening them for other purposes as well.
I hope Mrs Warren's Profession will be played everywhere, in season and
out of season, until Mrs Warren has bitten that fact into the public
conscience, and shamed the newspapers which support a tariff to keep
up the price of every American commodity except American manhood and
womanhood.

Unfortunately, Mr Daly had already suffered the usual fate of those who
direct public attention to the profits of the sweater or the pleasures
of the voluptuary. He was morally lynched side by side with me. Months
elapsed before the decision of the courts vindicated him; and even then,
since his vindication implied the condemnation of the press, which was
by that time sober again, and ashamed of its orgy, his triumph received
a rather sulky and grudging publicity. In the meantime he had hardly
been able to approach an American city, including even those cities
which had heaped applause on him as the defender of hearth and home when
he produced Candida, without having to face articles discussing whether
mothers could allow their daughters to attend such plays as You Never
Can Tell, written by the infamous author of Mrs Warren's Profession, and
acted by the monster who produced it. What made this harder to bear was
that though no fact is better established in theatrical business than
the financial disastrousness of moral discr