GOVERNOR JAMES H. HIGGINS, tions of public policy. From their viewpoint, the people should elect representatives to do their thinking for them. This conception is hostile to the principle of democracy, or the rule of the people, on which our government was founded. The representative system was intended to be an instrument for registering and enforcing the popular will. Every political party recognizes, at least in theory, that the people are competent to decide public questions for themselves, for each party adopts a platform of principles upon which its candidates stand and on which the party solicits the votes of the people. When the individual citizen employs an architect, no one questions his right to instruct him on the general plan of the house to be built, and to accept or reject the detailed plans which are afterwards worked out by the architect. In a legal case no one questions the right of the individual citizen to accept or reject the advice offered by his attorney. Is there any good reason why the citizens in their collective capacity should not have a similar right to suggest legislation to their representatives, and to accept or reject the legislative plans after they are worked out in detail? Your architect and your attorney are not your masters but your servants or agents. So your representatives in Congress, the State Legislature or City Council, should not be your rulers, as they are under present conditions, but your servants or agents. The people may make some mistakes in voting directly on public measures, just as the average citizen may make mistakes in deciding upon the kind of house he wishes his architect to build for him, or in deciding to enter upon a legal suit; but in collective as well as in individual affairs, we learn wisdom through our mistakes. Better an occasional error of judgment with the chance to correct it, than blind submission to laws, however perfect, which are imposed from without. The experience of Switzerland has been that the people move very slowly in the exercise of their direct-legislative powers. Contrary to common belief, the initiative and referendum make for a progressive conservatism rather than for a wild and headlong radicalism. The exercise of political power when applied directly to separate and distinct questions of public policy cannot fail to exert a powerful educational influence on the voters. It tends not only to make them more intelligent, but also more patriotic and devoted to the public welfare. It is not necessary that the voters should all be political or economic experts. In intricate questions of public policy, the average citizen will naturally rely on the judgment of those who have made a special study of these problems. And he can safely do so after the Initiative and Referendum have removed the graft-motive from politics. Admitting that some of the people are now incompetent to vote on important questions of public policy, the fact remains that the rule of the majority will tend to create those social conditions which will make for better manhood and womanhood. Machine-rule is always the rule of the privileged classes and the breeder of corruption and official faithlessness. The natural tendency of the people's rule will be to equalize and broaden opportunities, and thus to develop a higher grade of citizenship. In national affairs no one expects that more than a few issues-those of the most vital importance would be submitted to a referendum vote. The National Congress would continue to legislate and would take final action on all emergency measures which for lack of time could not be referred for a direct vote of the people. It is safe to predict, however, that under the Initiative and Referendum some of the ancient and venerable issues of party politics would quickly disappear from the arena of debate, and their place would be taken by new issues growing out of the new social and economic conditions of our times. Under the initiative system the prohibition of the liquor traffic, the inheritance tax, the taxation of land values, the national ownership of railroads and telegraphs and other new issues would be GOVERNOR COE I. CRAWFORD, Of South Dakota. JOHN M. STAHL, President Farmers' National Congress. submitted to a direct vote. If any or all of these measures were overwhelmingly defeated, they would probably be withdrawn for a time from the field of practical politics. If, on any issue, the result proved to be close, it would naturally be submitted to another referendum vote as soon as the legal limitations would permit, but there is no reason to fear that the voters would have to give up shoemaking or farming or selling goods in order to settle the affairs of state. We are living in a period of increasing social unrest. Great social and economic changes are impending. If the ship of state is to be steered safely through the coming years of storm and stress, the rule of the people must be restored. The best safeguard against violence and disorder, the best "safety-valve for discontent" is the direct-vote system, under which the will of the majority may always be freely expressed and enacted into law without hindrance or unnecessary delay. WILLIAM D. MACKENZIE. Washington, D. C. THE RIMINI STORY IN MODERN DRAMA. BY PROFESSOR ARCHIBALD HENDERSON, PH.D., Of the University of North Carolina. TH The great actor, Lawrence Barrett, played Boker's "Francesca da Rimini" in the year 1882, and for several years thereafter, throughout the United States. William P. Trent is authority for the statement that the play was a "conspicuous success." I had the pleasure of reading the very copy of the play that Mr. Barrett studied before he put it on the stage; this copy contained the stage notes in Barrett's handwriting, as well as his signature. HE TWO American writers who the ultimate choice of refusal in the have reshaped the Da Rimini matter of the marriage, but so persiststory into dramatic form are George ently is she urged by her father, who is H. Boker, and F. Marion Crawford, a political intriguer of the most accomand be it said to their credit that neither plished type, that at last she unwillingly of these writers has proved the fruit- consents in order to save her father and lessness of rehandling the theme which insure the integrity of the house of in Dante's hands took its most perfect Polenta. One deception is added to and enduring form. Indeed, it has another, and when the fearful end comes, been said that Crawford's play is a we see in it not the mere aimless working better "acting play" and promises more of a blind fate but the inevitable fall of success from a dramatic point-of-view the sword of retributive justice. than either Phillips' or D'Annunzio's play, while Boker's play was in its day, all things considered, a genuine success. George H. Boker, born in 1823, was at one time minister from the United States to Constantinople, and his Plays and Poems, in two volumes, which went certainly into as many as three editions, were comparatively well known during his lifetime. While Phillips' play is restrained art of the Greek type, and Maeterlinck's is even more Grecian in the eternal immanence of Destiny, Boker's Francesca da Rimini harks back to the manner of the dramatists who lived in the "spacious times" of Queen Elizabeth. Unlike Phillips, D'Annunzio or Crawford, Boker has introduced the heads of the houses of Polenta and Malatesta, one of them playing a very prominent part, while he has made the court jester the instrument in betraying to the hunchback, Lanciotto, the illicit love of his wife and brother. Boker follows Boccaccio's version of the story, in which Francesca is tricked into her marriage, but he makes no mention of the fact that Paolo was married at the time. Instead of making Francesca a mere pawn upon the chessboard of Guelph and Ghibelline fortune, Boker gives her The tragedy of F. Marion Crawford, entitled" Francesca da Rimini" and translated into French by the author of Vies Imaginaires, Marcel Schwob, first appeared in 1902, and was successfully produced at the Théatre Sarah Bernhardt on April 22d of that year. Bolder far than others who have dramatized the story, Crawford went straight to the old chronicles for the materials and chronology of the play, reserving only Boccaccio's story of the deception of Francesca, which indeed cannot be proven untrue. According to certain of the old chronicles, the historical sources relied upon by Crawford, the date of the tragedy is given as 1289, so that Paolo and Francesca have loved each other for fourteen years before Giovanni discovers their secret. This leads to a total redis tribution of dramatic values. The bloom and innocence of youth is exchanged for the fire and passion of a greater maturity. And this change is symbolized, one feels, by the exchange of the medium of poetry for that of prose. Francesca does not scruple to justify her long-established relations with Paolo, on the ground of the indefensible deception of her marriage. When a woman is heard one day in the courtyard below denouncing Paolo Malatesta as a coward and a betrayer, Francesca's jealousy and suspicion are instantly aroused and further confirmed when Paolo announces his intention of leaving for Florence that day to accept the post of captain of the guards. When Paolo hurries away to silence the traducer, whom he has recognized as his wife, Beatrice, in disguise, Francesca is left a prey to her worst fears: "a woman crying out his namea woman leading a child-and on this very day he talks of leaving me!" In the first agony of her disillusionment, Francesca, caught unawares, unconsciously betrays to Concordia, Giovanni's little daughter, the secret of her love for Paolo; and Concordia in turn unwittingly betrays it to Giovanni. In the meantime Beatrice has been arrested and is to be tried, among other prisoners, before Giovanni as lord of the haute et basse justice. Francesca is resolved that this woman shall be brought to trial while Paolo is equally resolved upon her escape. He bribes the gaoler to let Beatrice escape, but when Francesca but when Francesca insists that the woman be summoned, Paolo in desperation makes a sign to the gaoler. This sign is misconstrued, for the gaoler returns in a few moments with the announcement that the woman has strangled herself. Full of tragic intensity is the final scene, in which the face of the murdered woman is uncovered and recognized by all as the face of Beatrice-a scene fittingly closing upon Giovanni's solemn imperative: "Paolo Malatesta, bury your wife." We know from history that Paolo left Florence very shortly after he had been chosen Captain of the People. "We do not know," says Litta, in his Famiglie celebri d'Italia, "what very pressing business recalled him to Rimini: perhaps it was that very ardent love for Francesca da Rimini by which he was enthralled. . . ." So we find Paolo, whom we know from tradition as given to the arts of peace than to the exercises of war," secretly returning to Rimini; but not unsuspected by Giovanni, who is notified of Paolo's sudden departure from Florence. The poison has been at work, and Giovanni has turned from a blunt, open-hearted man into a crafty conspirator. His conversation with Francesca in the garden outside her chamber, her nervousness over his suggestion that they go indoors, where Paolo is concealed, her betrayal of profoundest interest in Paolo's welfare, all confirm Giovanni's worst suspicions. With Machiavellian art he concocts a story of Paolo's treachery, claiming to have been warned by the Florentine government that Paolo is planning to betray him and secure possession of Rimini. By easy and subtle gradations Giovanni leads the unsuspecting Francesca to confess that it is to Rimini that Paolo is most likely to come, when Giovanni darkly asserts: "Yes, I think it is likely that you will see him here to-day." The final scene, in Francesca's chamber, is the last fluttering struggle of these prisoners of hope. Neither is blind to the imminent danger, but they give themselves up to the rapture of present happiness. As they are reading the tale of Launcelot and Guinivere, a shadow falls across the page. Francesca glances up, and is just in time to receive the blow intended for Paolo. At the end Francesca drags herself to Paolo's side and cries exultantly to Giovanni, in a melodramatic tirade doubtless inspired by Bernhardt herself: "Look! Look! This is what you have asked in vain and I have refused-what you have longed for day and nightwhat you shall never have of me-look well! The kiss of love-supremeeternal-true." Mr. Crawford's play is notable in many respects, especially for the hardy inventiveness which endows Beatrice with a significant rôle, steals from the story its note of youthful innocence and pity, and effects the tragic dénouement without the customary device of the feigned departure. The situations are dramatically effective and the action steadily progressive. The French critics, generally laudatory in their appreciation of the play, have taken exception to two features: "the long attachment of the lovers, and Malatesta's change from a violent and outspoken man to a stealthy, smiling assassin"; and yet, as Mrs. Wharton in her brilliant essay, The Three Francescas, acutely puts it, these are the most characteristic racial traits in the drama. "It is at these points," she writes, "that Mr. Crawford has shown his insight into Italian character, and his courage in departing from stage conventions. He has had the audacity to draw his characters as Italians of the Middle Ages and not as scrupulous and sentimental modern altruists." Signor D'Annunzio's splendidly virile, brutally realistic, yet poetically conceived play, "Francesca da Rimini," has had a remarkable history, almost unparalleled in the history of the stage. Acted for the first time by Eleonora Duse and her Italian company at Rome, on December 9, 1901, it caused almost a riot. The play required five hours for its initial performance, and many of the speeches were inaudible on account of the noise in the theater. After this inhospitable treatment the play was freely cut and acted with the greatest success in the chief cities of Italy. It was my good fortune to see Signora Duse and her Italian company play it exactly one year after its initial performance in Rome, and the only free space in the theater was on the stage. The play has aroused the most animated discussion and will go down in dramatic history as a remarkable artistic triumph over violent and bitter opposition. There is, indeed, when we recall the author, little wonder that the original uncut version of the play should have been so riotously assailed. D'Annunzio has been called the Byron, or perhaps he should be more properly styled the Oscar Wilde, of modern Italy. Italians Italian men-declare it a disgrace to be in the same room with D'Annunzio, and anyone who knows the difficulty of shocking Italian men must realize at once the enormity of such a condemnation. The uncut version of "Francesca da Rimini" is tainted wth pruriency and indecent suggestion, reminding one in its coarseness and breadth of the pre-Elizabethan drama. It is manifest that the theater-going public owes a debt of gratitude to Signora Duse for having modified and purified the play so thoroughly that as acted by her and her company no part of the play could offend even a delicate sensibility. Signora Duse, to whom the play was dedicated-"To the divine Eleonora Duse," the dedication reads has not only purified the play, but has so informed it with her genius that its dramatic qualities have been given that conspicuity that only great drama ever possesses. name is so linked with the play and the author and Italy, that it is scarcely too much to say that she and D'Annunzio were collaborators in the creation of "Francesca da Rimini.” Her It is a most striking and most fitting circumstance that the greatest living Italian actress, the compeer of Bernhardt and Modjeska, the interpreter of Silvia Pellico's Francesca at the age of eleven, and to-day acclaimed the greatest actress in the world-that these two should have joined hands in giving to the world a splendid revival of the pathetic love story cast by their countryman, Dante, in the exquisite mold of perfect poetry. Of all the plays ever written upon the |