of what they have gotten; their condition is perhaps best illustrated by the experience of two small boys in a Baptist family, who decided that their goat had a soul to save and that he could not get to heaven except through immersion. Spurred on by a sense of duty calling, they undertook to administer this important religious rite, and proceeded with the "billy" to a nearby stream. At the water's edge the goat developed convictions of his own on the subject and declined to proceed farther. One boy undertook to pull while the other pushed, with the result that the one went headlong in front of the goat into the stream while the other landed on the nearest bank. When Joe crawled out of the water he addressed his brother thus: "Sam! Billy doesn't deserve to go to heaven; let's not immerse him but just sprinkle him and let him go to hell with the Methodists." I rather imagine that the business people have the thought that Congress gave them similar treatment in the revision of the 1918 law.

The Congress should know that next to a just law we should have a permanent tax policy for peace time without too much regard for political conventions. Business is sick and shell-shocked from the war; it must be encouraged to learn to walk again. It is not for the layman with segmentary information to assert definite and rigid rules of taxation, but it is the business both of Congress and industry to create a basis of study that will be a trustworthy guide for the Congress to enable it to arrive at proper rates. Both business and the administration must prompt rather than further deaden initiative in business.

The week beginning December 4th was set aside as Educational Week and President Harding appealed to all Americans to strengthen their devotion to our educational system and improve it by study, suggestion and work. This is a most worthy action, for education is fundamental to the continuation and success of this form of government in which we are supposed to be ruled by a majority of the people, who are only safe in thus ruling in proportion as they are kept informed on the questions on which they are to rule.

This great movement in the interest of education needs to reach beyond the public schools. The country requires a larger number of unselfish students of the problems of government. When the constitutional convention decided upon a representative republic as a form of government for this country it was with the thought that the representatives of the people would be experts chosen only on their character and qualifications to digest the problems of the people and make laws in the interests of all citizens. Demagogues, therefore, are more harmful in this form of government and more dangerous than anarchists. They are therefore to be safeguarded against by educating the people to think and act for themselves on public questions.

It was Edmund Burke, the great English statesman, who when commenting on our plan of government adopted at the constitutional convention, stated that "the real test of the success of the American government will depend on the ability of the American people to educate its leaders." The primary duty of citizenship, therefore, is to encourage and develop our educational system and insist on prepared men and women assuming the responsibilities of public service.

We commend the appeal of the President of the United States in the interest of Educational Week. May we not also suggest the consideration by the President of an appeal to all industry, business and other units of our citizenship to organize a thoroughly comprehensive study with him of the great economic questions which are today so greatly disturbing our citizens in both domestic and foreign relations? This educational coöperation should be, of course, nationwide, and should be an unselfish endeavor by all classes and all interests to assist in the framing and carrying on of a positive and constructive national program rather than only a negative and more or less unintelligent effort resulting from the opposing blocs of the respective interests.

We can hardly expect to keep our nation in the forefront of the rest of the world if our group citizenship is to be continually disrupted by internecine quarreling and if a part of our body politic is to be seeking its own aggrandizement at the expense and well being of other parts. One of the most

distressing developments of recent times is the organization of legislative blocs by which classes of our citizens seek to accomplish results which may be opposed and contested by other classes of citizens. It does not require very deep study to understand that this is diametrically opposed to the political ideals and beliefs which attended the foundation of this republic, which have endured to the present time and which we can not now discard if our nation is to continue to exist and our people to be prosperous and happy.

We need to organize and correlate the common interests of the country to solve the problems of this reconstruction time. This is as necessary now as it was during the war period. We have drifted off into selfish struggles that only nullify constructive programs for the country's good. It has been well said that a man is not a good citizen who does not give some thought to, and spend some effort in, a larger sphere than that in which he exercises his selfish endeavors. He must contribute something to the common service of humanity. The same is true of business or group citizenship. Let us give thought to these things and work out programs of general good and get behind them with a perseverance and persistence that will not yield to defeat.

The Comedy of Stage Death

THORNTON S. GRAVES

University of North Carolina.

That stage deaths are funny no observant playgoer will deny. Who has not laughed to see some realist dive into a coal-scuttle on being hit by a high-power bullet, or giggled at the sort of histrionic filibustering practiced by expiring elocutionists? A few of us have smiled at Lear's happy corpse leading out its daughter to listen at the applause; and many of us are still extant who appreciated the joke when Peter Grimm once printed in his programmes that, having returned once, he would return no more until the show was over. Thanks to the Southern California School of Art, remarks George Ade, the tragedy of the past has become the comedy of the present. The hero who is shot elicits shrieks of laags ter, while the villain who sinks amid bubbles into the deep inspires a paroxism of mirth in the large lady seated next y in the playhouse. Yes, the comedy of stage death is obvious in American drama no less than in Chinese. Such being the case, this paper seeks not to prove it, but to demonstrate by illustration and quotation that it has always been so. Such an undertaking is perhaps not altogether idle in view of Mr. Ade's statement above; for many of us, as a result of the marvelous strides of recent drama in Southern California and elsewhere, are prone to forget that the detection of comedy in dead and dying actors is neither a modern nor an American acquirement, but, like democracy and stage censorship, is a venerable inheritance from our ancestors.

Not only have human beings enjoyed from remotest times the humor of stage death, but classic scholars, too, have seen the joke and philosophized upon the subject. Naturally averse to all deeds of violence, and holding with the Greeks that the business of tragedy is to be serious, they have argued that stage deaths should be of the gentlest type or else confined to the green room and rhetoric. Such Englishmen as Dryden, to illustrate, and William Cooke, some hundred years later, declared that death on the stage in consequence of duel or

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battle has been a perennial cause of laughter, while Paul Hiffernan in his Dramatic Genius (1772) enumerates among the unfailing sources of comic effect not only "ungraceful attempts at fencing" but the dying prostrations of hero or heroine, "either precipitately alarming or slidingly awkward," and the "petit manoeuveres of drinking poison out of small pocketdram-bottles."

The truth of the claim that the actor who dies by sword or dagger becomes temporarily a comedian is proved by an abundance of anecdotes-trustworthy and otherwise. What could have been funnier, for instance, than the provincial Tybalt, a "barn-spouting hero," who, writes Francis Gentleman, was so realistic as the result of liquor and a love of his art that he refused utterly to be defeated and was driving the exhausted Romeo from the stage when suddenly he crumpled in death at the command of his loud-voiced wife behind the scenes. Equally diverting must have been the "fiery" Tybalt who, according to Tate Wilkinson, "fell down dead without an attempt at battle" so soon as he perceived that Romeo carried a real sword instead of a stage foil. Somewhat similar was the death of a "scholarly" amateur described by Mrs. Mowatt. He spoke the lines of Paris with correctness and effect, but on being wounded by the reckless Romeo he was put to a great disadvantage by his scholarly deliberateness, for, being reluctant to fall with an undignified bang, he carefully selected a soft spot by looking over his shoulder and descended gently and deliberately to his final rest. Hamlet's wicked uncle has afforded much amusement to earlier generations. As one historian of the stage has said, "it is a remarkable fact that as a rule the death of the King, even under ordinary circumstances, always raises a laugh." He has oftentimes passed away under circumstances other than ordinary. Two illustrations of the comic quality in Claudius will suffice. Powrie, says Baynham in his history of the Glasgow stage, was once acting Hamlet to the Claudius. of Alexander. Powrie's aim was to emphasize the seriousness of the King's death rather than the humor of his overthrow; hence, instead of placing the throne in the center of