rruption and the grasping spirit
of corporations are constantly affording the demagogue or the
dreamer opportunity to preach the destruction of civil order
with great plausibility, giving scope to reckless theorists
who have so often, in the world's history, baffled the
endeavours of the rational and patient liberalists of their
day.

This excited in me an ardent desire to do what little I could
as a dramatist to counteract what seemed to me the poisonous
influences of these hidden forces: to write a play which might
throw some light on the goal of destruction to which these
influences inevitably lead, whenever the agitation between
capital and labour accepts the leadership of anarchism.

The time chosen by me was that of the Terror in France,
1793-94, during which the noble fruits of the French
Revolution came near to annihilation, thanks to the supremacy,
for a time, of a small band of anarchical men who, in the name
of liberty, invoked the tyranny of terror.

The hero of my play, _Paul Kauvar_, has for his prototype
Camille Desmoulins, one of the most conspicuous and sincere
sons of liberty of his day, who--in spite of his magnificent
devotion to freedom--when he dared oppose the Jacobins, was
beheaded at the guillotine--a martyr to national, as distinct
from personal, liberty.

The typical anarchist in my play is portrayed in _Carrac_,
whose prototype was Thomas Carier, sent into La Vendee as a
representative of the Jacobin convention. It was this man who,
without process of law, guillotined or destroyed most
horribly over one hundred thousand innocent men, women, and
children--in the name of liberty. He it was who invented
the "republican marriage"--the drowned bodies of whose
naked victims dammed the river Loire, and rendered its water
pestilential.

The _Duc de Beaumont_ portrays a type of the true noblesse of
France--proud, fearless, often unjust, never ignoble.

_Gouroc_ depicts the intriguing type of noblesse whose egotism
and cruelty engendered the tyranny of the monarchy, and
justified its destruction.

The prototype of General Delaroche was the brave and generous
_Henri de la Rochejacquelin_, young leader of the royalists in
La Vendee.

By the interplay of these types, I have sought to emphasize
what is truly heroic in the strugg