tapestries that we call plays.

We are beginning. We have found that American plays must be American
in spirit. We are tired of imitations and adaptations. We want
plays worthy of the great Republic. Some good work has recently
been done, giving great hope for the future. Of course the realistic
comes first; afterward the ideal. But here in America, as in all
other lands, love is the eternal passion that will forever hold
the stage. Around that everything else will move. It is the sun.
All other passions are secondary. Their orbits are determined by
the central force from which they receive their light and meaning.

Love, however, must be kept pure.

The great dramatist is, of necessity, a believer in virtue, in
honesty, in courage and in the nobility of human nature. He must
know that there are men and women that even a God could not corrupt;
such knowledge, such feeling, is the foundation, and the only
foundation, that can support the splendid structure, the many
pillared stories and the swelling dome of the great drama.

--_The New York Dramatic Mirror_, December 26, 1891.

WOMAN.

It takes a hundred men to make an encampment, but one woman can
make a home. I not only admire woman as the most beautiful object
ever created, but I reverence her as the redeeming glory of humanity,
the sanctuary of all the virtues, the pledge of all perfect qualities
of heart and head. It is not just or right to lay the sins of men
at the feet of women. It is because women are so much better than
men that their faults are considered greater.

The one thing in this world that is constant, the one peak that
rises above all clouds, the one window in which the light forever
burns, the one star that darkness cannot quench, is woman's love.
It rises to the greatest heights, it sinks to the lowest depths,
it forgives the most cruel injuries. It is perennial of life, and
grows in every climate. Neither coldness nor neglect, harshness
nor cruelty, can extinguish it. A woman's love is the perfume of
the heart.

This is the real love that subdues the earth; the love that has
wrought all the miracles of art, that gives us music all the way
from the cradle song to the grand closing symphony that bears the
soul away on wings of fire. A love that is greater than power,
sweeter than life and stronger than death.

STRIKES, EXPANSION AND OTHER SUBJECTS.

_Question_. What have you to say in regard to the decision of
Jud