I have been sent, from the American desk, two columns upon the new playhouse: one delighted, one indignant. I find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with the lady entirely and still thinking the matter has not been stated at its worst.

Both my colleagues discuss what the exhibition does to the eleven persons upon the stage. I am more troubled by what it does to the several thousand in the seats.

A theatre of the old kind asked something of an audience. It required you to follow an argument for three hours, to hold two ideas at once, to grant a man his premise and see where it carried him. You might leave disagreeing, but you left having been asked. That asking is not a small thing. A people accustomed to being asked something in the evening is a people rather harder to govern badly in the morning.

This new arrangement asks nothing. It requires no attention that cannot be abandoned mid-sentence, no memory beyond the previous quarrel, no judgment except the judgment of whether you like the person, which is not a judgment at all but a preference wearing its coat. And it trains the eye to a particular and, I think, dangerous pleasure: the pleasure of watching a person be diminished and feeling nothing whatever about it, because a wall has been arranged so that they cannot see you watching.

Consider then the vote which my colleague from Philadelphia proposes with such enthusiasm, whereby the audience each week expels one of the company. He offers it as a device for selling tickets, and as that it will answer admirably. But look at what is being rehearsed. A public is assembled, given a person, and invited to remove them, on no stated ground, by simple preference, with no case made and no defence heard. It costs the voter nothing. It is over in a moment. It is thrilling.

I have spent my career arguing that a people must be permitted to judge their governors, and I do not withdraw a word of it. But judgment is a habit, and habits are learnt in the cheap places before they are practised in the dear ones. A public that has spent two years expelling strangers from a house for being tiresome has learnt something about how to dispose of people, and it has learnt it in the one setting where the lesson has no consequences at all. It will not remain in that setting. Nothing ever does.

My delighted colleague observes that men have always paid to watch other men fall out, and this is perfectly true; the Romans made a considerable industry of it and I would direct him to how that concluded. The innovation is not the appetite. The innovation is that we have made the appetite cheap, continuous, and respectable, and installed it in the parlour where the children can see.

I do not propose to prohibit it. I have never yet seen a prohibition improve a taste. I ask only that we stop describing it as harmless, and that those who profit by it be required to say plainly what they are selling, which is not a play, and is not the truth either, but the sensation of sitting in judgment without ever having to be right.