EL LIBERTADOR

The millennium is at hand. And oddly enough it is about to be realized, not in America, which is commonly supposed to be the home of progress and of consummated ideals, but in France. One Thomas Van Dycke has founded a theatre in Paris for his Dramahouse Players where the best productions of the American and the English stages are to be reproduced in the original tongues.

This in itself is no startling innovation; there have been before, and there are now, many theatres in many cities where the dramatic talent of foreign nations is produced in all its original beauty. New York has its Jewish theatres, its Polish theatres, its Greek theatres; and even Boston itself, that part of the universe which is vulgarly imagined to move the slowest, has its own producing companies of Chinese. Mr. Van Dycke has instituted a reform of far more universal significance; if he is successful, his name will go ringing down the centuries coupled with those of Garibaldi and Bolivar. His memory will, be a sacred thing, and multitudes will call him blessed. Briefly, Mr. Van Dycke has eliminated tipping.

Patrons of American theatres have seldom been cursed with the plague of usher-tipping; that particular institution, very fortunately, is wholly French. But there are barbers in America, and hat-check girls, and boot-blacks, and waiters, and a whole host of black-eyed banditti whose entire stock in trade is a hypnotic countenance and an irritated palm. If Mr. Van Dyke can only find the opportunity and the strength of character to extend his magnificent principle to take in all these special cases, his claim to the everlasting gratitude of the down-trodden bourgeois will be assured.