VERY one of us is a critic, and every one of us uses the critical faculty repeatedly every day of his life. There are few terms more often used in speech than "I like" or "I don't like," and the thought the words represent is present to us, often unspoken and more often hardly noticed, in every action we undertake and in every feeling we experience. The conscious and even unconscious use of the faculty is what marks the difference between the agreeable and the disagreeable, the pleasant and the unpleasant, the thing that is desirable and the thing that is to be avoided.

This right to criticise is one which is necessary to our comfort, well-being and happiness. Abused, it makes its abuser simply an unreasonable fault-finder who becomes personally a nuisance and one whose utterances are of no effect except to make him unpopular. But reasonable and based on logic, the criticism of the one, joined with the criticisms of the others, becomes the voice of the many and from that the expression of the popular will. Therefore free speech and free criticism are almost the same in meaning

and under free governments any encroachments on either is, and should be, resented as an encroachment on the most elementary and most fundamental of the rights of a free people.

A trust may be a beneficent institution. So may a despotism be a benevolent government. Unfortunately in both cases the good or bad results depend too much on the individual characteristics of those in control. Doubtless no better form of government could be devised than that of an all-wise, all-good and all-just despot. Under such government there would be no attempt to control criticism because no just criticism would be possible and no critic would be listened to. A similar trust would accomplish results in its particular line of activities also above criticism. Some of our own industrial trusts claim, and apparently with much truth, that they have bettered many former conditions. They point with pride to reductions they have brought about in the price of the commodities in which they deal, to improvements in quality and to how they have extended distribution and brought comforts to regions that never knew them before. These claims are made in extenuation of the criticism that all trusts are based on monopoly, which destroys in

dividual independence and endeavor, and that the monopolies have been created by sacrificing the happiness of many in establishing the power and wealth of a few. The favorite defense of the theatrical trust against criticism of its tyranny and cruel methods is that it has accomplished some improvements in the conduct of the theatrical business. It, too, points with pride to something.

All despotisms and monopolies, whether of government or of trade, hate free speech and free criticism. These last have a way of educating the many in the methods of the few, and, properly educated, the many can always prevail against the few. We are every day receiving proof of what the people can do as they become enlightened in the methods of the industrial trusts. The free criticism of their methods is leading to legislative activity and to the correction of abuses. With the power of criticism limited or controlled by the trusts, their monopolies might have gone on entrenching them

Mr. Lee Shubert, who has taken a conspicuous part in the opposition to the theatrical trust.

selves in power until it would have been impossible to assail them by any means short of actual revolution.

The theatrical trust, in the matter of criticism, is in a much worse position than the industrial trusts. With the latter the question to be settled is how they acquired their monopolies and how they are using them to oppress their possible competitors and to burden the consumers of their products. With the theatrical trust criticism concerns not only these questions but the very nature and quality of its product from day to day. As the theater is, in a way, a luxury and not a necessity, it can be abstained from even to the point of seriously injuring the welfare of the trust. Free criticism means a daily informing of the people of the quality of that product. If criticism can be bought, or better yet, terrified, it ceases to be free and the quality of the product need be determined only by the mental capacity or the greed of those in control of the trust.

Just how this works out in practice will be better understood if we know a little more about what is called the theatrical trust and how it comes to have what seems a most absurd thing, the monopoly of an art. Art, we are told, is as free as air, and it seems incredible that any man or body of men should make it their commercial property. That there should be a beef trust seems equally absurd, when we think how widely distributed and simple is the raising and butchering of cattle, and in a similar way the monopolies of many of the other trusts seem out of reason. It might seem even an impossibility to shackle so intangible a thing as an art, but like the other monopolies, the theatrical trust is based not on a control of the product itself, nor of its constituent parts, but by securing to itself a control of certain facilities. This control makes it the sole customer for goods and services and therefore the only agency through which those goods and services can be brought to public sale and recompense.

Up to a few years ago-less than fifteen-an actor or troupe of actors could roam the country over, giving their entertainments in one place and, unless they were very unfortunate, securing from the proceeds at least the means of transportation to another. Naturally it was to their advantage that the intervening