joy is not a joyous life. The advertisements of patent medicines and quack physicians printed daily on the sporting pages of New York newspapers left M. Brieux no secrets to disclose.

It is possible, of course, to imagine "Damaged Goods,” “The Lure" and "The Fight" used educationally, but the thought is not one on which the fancy loves to dwell. It is possible to imagine a tremendous pageant in Central Park, perhaps, to which all the school children of the city were invited. There might be four stages. "Damaged Goods" might be given on one, "The Lúre” on a second, "The Fight" on a third and Mr. Reginald Wright Kauffman's "The House of Bondage" on another. Such an entertainment would undoubtedly be vastly enjoyed and undoubtedly it would put many of the younger children present in possession of new facts. I do not think that the most devoted admirer of these plays would consider this a beneficial exhibition, but it is absolutely the only way in which they could be used to give information-absolutely the only way in which they could really become factors of sex education.

I am willing to pass over the charge that what are termed the White Slave dramas are untrue, because I am not a specialist in this picturesque subject, and my opinion as to the veracity of "The Lure" and "The Fight" would be valueless. I will not attempt to prove, as certain distinguished students of social problems have stated, that actual White Slavery is exceedingly rare, that the cases in which a girl is forced against her will to lead an immoral life are difficult to find. This, however, I do affirm, that the sex plays which we are considering tonight are grossly defective as instruments of education because they show only one side of sex relationship and that the diseased side.

Ladies and gentlemen, I was once sentenced to a year's servitude as teacher in a high school in a small New Jersey town. I am not at all vain of my career as a teacher, I did not know and do not now know, much about teaching. But I had at least this elemental knowledge of my work. I never attempted to instill a knowledge of English grammar into my pupils by making them day after day, and week after week, devote themselves to a study of grammatical errors. The ungrammatical sentence was occasionally given as a test of their knowledge but their work chiefly consisted in the study of correct English, of the best prose suited to their comprehension. What would you think of

a teacher of mathematics who did nothing but exhibit to his pupils problems incorrectly solved? Of a parent who tried to improve his child's table manners by habitually, as a horrible example, eating with his knife, drinking out of his soup plate and wiping his mouth on the table-cloth? This is exactly the method of the people who have constituted themselves our teachers in the important matter of sex relationship.

You must be healthy, they say. All right, we say, how shall we do it? And they show us a succession of people repulsively diseased. You must be continent, they say. And they enforce this lesson by showing us a mimic world, populated entirely by harlots and rakes. It is true that the ancient Spartans once a year, showed a repulsive drunkard to their young men in order to emphasize the value of temperance. But they did not din the topic of drunkenness into their ears, day in and day out. On the contrary, they held up for their emulation, examples of dignity, strength and sobriety. No preacher ever changed the tenor of a man's ways by continually harping on the text "the wages of sin is death." He can not afford to neglect the rest of the sentence "but the Grace of God is life everlasting."

The dramatists whom we are considering are undoubtedly sincere men but they are trying to make their audiences virtuous by concentrating their attention habitually upon vice. And this, as Euclid says, is absurd. Any play, however cheap and sensational, that exhibits courage and chastity, triumphant over evil is superior as a moral force to the most artfully constructed portrayal of the life of degenerates. "The Lure" is, in my opinion, one of the most skilfully constructed plays presented on the New York stage for many a year, but I am quite serious in saying that as a factor in sex education, it is a thousand times inferior to "Bertha, the Beautiful Cloak Model."

I am aware that it is somewhat rash to criticise these plays. A friend of mine, a dramatic critic, ventured to write a rather severe review of one of them. It was not, it is perhaps needless to say, "The Lure." A few days after his criticism appeared in print, he received a letter from a serious-minded lady, resident in a town in Northern New York State, in which he was scathingly condemned as a hireling of the Vice Trust. Furthermore, the lady stated her belief that the enterprising directors of the Vice Trust had absolute control of the paper for which he wrote.

Now to go back for a minute to my first accusation that these plays make the hideous evils of sexual immorality commonplace. I think proof of this is to be found in the attitude of the audiences. Go to a performance of "Damaged Goods" or "The Fight" and watch the people while the play is going on and between the acts. You will not find many blanched, horror-stricken, tear-stained faces. You will not find the people talking in hushed voices of the horrors that have been reviewed to them. Their attitude is that of hard indifference, relieved only by a somewhat unpleasant curiosity and a wholly simple and natural desire to be entertained. You will find them comparing the play with other examples of the White Slave drama which they have seen, criticising the realism of some of the scenes and lamenting that certain features which they have heard described as salacious, have been omitted.

These plays and countless novels on the same theme have brought about a marked change in the mental attitude of even young girls. The monstrosity of prostitution is now merely the commonplace "social evil." The strange woman who draws men down to death is merely "our unfortunate sister." The pimp is no more phenomenal than the pick-pocket. It may indeed be said that the new dramatists are doing away with the double standard of morality. But they are doing it not by raising the standard of the men but by lowering the standard of the women.

There are two other charges that I would make against the drama of morbid sex relationship. In the first place it is reaction

The defenders of such plays as those of M. Brieux and M. Wedekind, Mr. Scarborough and Mr. Veiller, apparently wish to do away with many centuries of progress, to restore to our stage the speech of the days of the Restoration. M. Brieux is not the first person to think it desirable for the most repulsive diseases to be freely discussed. There was a time, it must be remembered, when Wycherly and Beaumont and Fletcher and many another outspoken playwright entertained the people, when nearly every play had at least one scene laid in a brothel. There was no false modesty in those days. A lady of quality would playfully chide her partner in the dance by saying, “A pox on you!" I do not know why Mr. Scarborough and Mr. Veiller are so eager to return to the speech and manners of the Restoration. It cannot be that they admire the morals of that period.

The other charge is that these plays take the responsibility

of sin from the individual and place it upon society. Hitherto the libertine has frankly acknowledged that he did wrong because of his own weakness. He has not tried to evade his guilt. The prostitute has told of a seduction, perhaps, but she has generally taken a practical, unsentimental view of her life. Now the dramatists are working overtime to supply these people with excuses. The libertine is a libertine because he was not made to read Doctor Sylvanus Stall's "What a Two Year Old Child Ought To Know," or because three years before his birth his father flirted with a waitress. The prostitute is a prostitute not because she is lustful and lazy and weak-willed but because of "heredity" or "economic determinism" or some other convenient bugbear. It is a terribly dangerous thing to furnish people with ready-made excuses, to take away from them the right of free will. But this is what our sex educators who use the drama as an instrument are deliberately doing.

A thousand plays like "The Lure" or "Damaged Goods" will never cleanse a single mind of vicious desires, will never confer on any man or woman the grace of purity. It is doubtful whether the stage has any great value as a moral director-people insist on going to the play not to be improved but to be entertained. But this is beyond a shadow of doubt,-that the drama can become a valuable factor in sex education only when such men as the author of "Damaged Goods," "The Lure" and "The Fight” devote the energy which they now spend in portraying vice and disease in portraying instead "whatsoever things are true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever holy, whatsoever lovely, whatsoever of good fame.”

THE PRESENT-DAY THEATRE AND THE SEX

PROBLEM

JULES ECKERT GOODMAN

Last Spring there was produced in New York a drama of the most striking and forceful character. It was not a new play but had been known for several years. Although it was by an acknowledged dramatist of high merit, and the play itself had been regarded as a remarkable piece of work, yet, no manager had dared to produce it, so very bold was it in what it had to say and so very free-from-the-shoulder in the saying. It finally saw the foot-lights, sponsored by a very worthy society and produced as a "special" performance.

Very few could have foreseen the results of that performance. That a play written frankly and entirely upon venereal diseases could do anything but shock and awaken disgust was not to be thought of. The whole unwritten code of the stage was against it. As a sort of clinic for a special audience it might find tolerance; but as a general lesson and entertainment to the public it could be nothing short of horror and indecency. Yet Brieux's play, "Damaged Goods," when it was presented was found not so much to shock and disgust as to impress very deeply; and the people who saw it awoke to the fact that here was a drama that was not in any sense a sensation, but instead a very vital, human document.

The very first consequence was a good one; an assured continuance of this play which would permit it to be seen by the general public. That was fine and splendid. For here was a play, written by a mastery of dramaturgy, who was zealously in earnest, who believed that he had a great lesson to teach, and who taught that lesson by writing a big play in a frank, fine, clean manner. He had produced in short a masterpiece, and a masterpiece is always sane and healthy.

But there were other results too; and it is these other results that raise the questions as to the drama as a factor in sex education. No sooner had "Damaged Goods" been found to be a "popular" as well as an artistic success, than rumors began to float up and down Broadway of various plays to be produced on