urs, grow to be as rich and magnificent a person
as any one in the Socialist State. But if you do not please people at
all, either the connoisseurs of the municipal art collection or
private associations of art patrons or the popular buyer, well, then
your lot will be no harder than the lot of any unsuccessful artist
now; you will have to do something else for a time and win leisure to
try again.

Theatrical productions will be run on a sort of improvement upon
contemporary methods, but there will be no cornering of talent
possible, no wild advertisement of favoured stars upon strictly
commercial lines, no Theatrical Trust. The theatres will be municipal
buildings, every theatre-going voter will be keen to see them
comfortable and fine; they will, perhaps, be run in some cases by a
public repertoire company and in another by a lessee, and this latter
may be financed by his own private savings or by subscribers or
partners, or by a loan from the public bank as the case may be. This
latter method of exploitation by a lessee will probably also work best
in the public Music Halls, but it is quite equally possible that these
may be controlled by managers under partly elected and partly
appointed public committees. In some cases the theatrical lessee might
be a kind of stage society organized for the production of particular
types of play. The spectators will pay for admission, of course, as
they do now, but to the municipal box offices; and I suppose the
lessee or the author and artists will divide up the surplus after the
rent of the theatre has been deducted for the municipal treasury. In
every town of any importance there will be many theatres, music halls
and the like, perhaps under competing committees. In all these
matters, as every intelligent person understands, one has to maintain
variety of method, a choice of avenues, freedom from autocracies; and
since the Socialist community will contain a great number of
intelligent persons with leisure and opportunity for artistic
appreciation, there is little chance of this important principle being
forgotten, much less than there is in this world where a group of
dealers can often make an absolute corner in this artistic market or
that. You will not, under Socialism, see Sarah Bernhardt playing in a
tent as she had to do in America, because all the theatres have been
closed against her through some mean dispute with a Trust about the
sharing of profits....

And if it is n