at class--have been of the opinion that it is a
wicked thing to go to see a play if it is enacted by some company of
play-actors such as might come along on their theatrical route; yet in
that town for years the townspeople have been giving plays of their own,
in which nearly the whole population of the place would join, old and
young, rich and poor, wise and unwise. The whole family from grandmother
to grandchild will sometimes appear in one play, and all the cousins and
relatives of the whole "team-haul community" will come to see. They give
many standard melodramas, and they have also tried their hand at
Shakespearean drama, to the great enjoyment and uplift of themselves,
both those that thoroughly capture the meaning of the play by training
for the parts, and those that closely if charitably attend and listen.
Why should not this be done in every small town? Why should not the
unused building, an old barn, a store-loft, be transformed into a
country theater, where the whole village may assemble twice a week or
oftener, and run through a play together, getting joy and culture at
once?

If once the ingrained, inherited prejudice, handed down from those
misinterpreting honorable ancestors of ours, could be overcome, the
plunge might be taken and the drama could become the education and
inspiring agent that it has the capacity to be in our homes, our
schools, and our towns and villages.

Especially to the remote village and to the lonely farm would this form
of entertainment be a benefit. Do we not need this also to help lift the
ban of loneliness and to supply that elasticity of spirit that means
life to us? Companionship is our lack, the impact of various lives upon
ours, the stirring of resentment against wrong or of enthusiastic
approval of the good and noble that comes from the clash of motives,
right and wrong, wise and unwise. If we are denied the opportunity to
see and feel all this in the scenes from actual life in which we
ourselves in our own persons participate, we may receive some portion at
least of the education to be derived from such impact by living for a
time in the imagined world of the dramatist's creation and by watching
the constant intricate play of emotion in the dialogue. And this we can
in no other way do so well as by taking a part in the drama and
appropriating it for our own; by living in that part, adopting the
imagined circumstances for our own and following out the problem in the
char