My esteemed colleague finds the new playhouse a fine business and has generously offered its proprietors three suggestions for making it a finer one. I have read his column twice. I should like to raise the matter he has walked around.

The persons upon that stage are not acting.

A player in the ordinary theatre is protected by the part. When the audience laughs at a fool, the man playing the fool goes home and is not a fool, and everybody in the house understands the arrangement. That protection has been removed here, deliberately, because the removal is what the public has come to see. When these eleven quarrel, they are not quarrelling as anybody. They are quarrelling. And when the house laughs, it laughs at a person, who will be that person tomorrow, and next year, and in the town where she is known.

I attended a second sort of exhibition on Thursday, and I recommend that the gentlemen of this paper attend one before they write another word about the economy of the thing. A young woman of no fortune is placed before a company of suitors. She must choose among them, in public, by degrees, dismissing one each evening to the great satisfaction of the room. Her manner of choosing is discussed afterwards in every tavern in the city by men who have never met her and have formed a settled view of her character.

She is not paid what a player is paid. She is paid, I am told, in being spoken of, which is a currency that has never yet bought anybody a winter’s coal.

Consider what she has actually exchanged. She has given her temper, her plainest moments, her face at the instant of being refused, and her name; and she has received in return a fortnight of being known, and afterwards a permanent reputation she did not write and cannot correct. The proprietor has given the price of the candles. I invite anyone to describe that as an equal bargain and to keep a straight face while doing it.

And observe who is exhibited. It is not the men of property. Gentlemen of substance are not shut in a house and watched for their quarrels; they are the ones who own the wall with the aperture in it. Those upon the stage are, without exception, people who required the money, or the notice, or both, and who were in no position to negotiate the terms.

My colleague says the raw material walks in of its own accord and asks to be used. He is quite right, and I would ask him to sit with his own sentence a while. When a thing is cheap it is worth asking who is bearing the cost, because the cost has not vanished merely because it is not on the proprietor’s books.

I do not ask for the playhouse to be shut. I ask for the players to be treated as players: named, paid, and permitted to stop being the part when they walk out of the door. Remember the ladies upon that stage. Nobody else in this building appears likely to.