of your house under an extended contract and we will give you the best-drawing attractions. If you do not give us the exclusive agency," the alternative is obvi

ous. To the traveling manager and actor they were in a position to offer the choice between an exclusive contract with convenient and profitable routes or taking

At one stage it appeared that there might be a halt in their course. Most of the theaters in the United States had given Messrs. Klaw and Erlanger their exclusive agencies. Here and there, however, there was a local manager who had an individuality to preserve. He was a town institution in a way and had grown up with American ideas of business independence. He held out against surrendering his property practically into the absolute control of outsiders, retaining for himself simply the position of a local underling to the dictation of none too gentle absentee masters. There were also a few well known American actors who

resented being treated without ordinary civility or courtesy and they combined for a short time to resist the monopoly which was almost complete. It is generally believed that if they had stood together a little longer they could have made their own terms and saved their calling from many of the degradations to which it has since been subjected. But in one instance treachery, and in others cowardice, broke up this solemnly-made combination. of actors and, so far as attractions were concerned, the trust monopoly was virtually in complete control. The few local managers who had stood out saw themselves being driven to absolute starvation because their theaters stood idle, and those, too, were finally driven into subjection.

To conciliate what might have been an effective opposition it was necessary in the early days to secure the entertainments of one or two New York managers who were also large producers of plays and of others who controlled theaters in two or three of the larger cities outside of New York. This was done by means of an offensive-defensive alliance between the producing and local managers and the booking agency. This made the theatrical trust. In the accepted definition of the word the theatrical trust is not a trust at all, but is a working arrangement which is so much to the advantage of the parties to it that, even in the face of strong reasons on the part of individual members for abandoning it, it has held its own perfectly. There have been rumors of internal dissensions, but self-interest and the tremendous profits have kept the combination intact.

Had the members of this alliance been content to stop here, they would have been subject only to the same kind of criticism that has been measured out to other business monopolies. In a business way they were guilty of tyrannies and oppressions which inflicted hardships in many cases amounting to ruin for those who opposed them in the creation and maintenance of their absolute control of the theatricalbusiness. For these wrongs they would have had to suffer only the same kind of publicity and criticism encountered by other monopolies that have employed methods similar to their own. But they were not content with confining themselves only to the business of the theater.