go deep enough into things to be able to say no, how many ignorant half-starved girls will believe you are speaking sincerely?  To them the lot of Iris is heavenly in comparison with their own.  Yet our King, like his predecessors, says to the dramatist, “Thus, and thus only, shall you present Mrs Warren’s profession on the stage, or you shall starve.  Witness Shaw, who told the untempting truth about it, and whom We, by the Grace of God, accordingly disallow and suppress, and do what in Us lies to silence.”  Fortunately, Shaw cannot be silenced.  “The harlot’s cry from street to street” is louder than the voices of all the kings.  I am not dependent on the theatre, and cannot be starved into making my play a standing advertisement of the attractive side of Mrs Warren’s business.

Here I must guard myself against a misunderstanding.  It is not the fault of their authors that the long string of wanton’s tragedies, from Antony and Cleopatra to Iris, are snares to poor girls, and are objected to on that account by many earnest men and women who consider Mrs Warren’s Profession an excellent sermon.  Mr Pinero is in no way bound to suppress the fact that his Iris is a person to be envied by millions of better women.  If he made his play false to life by inventing fictitious disadvantages for her, he would be acting as unscrupulously as any tract writer.  If society chooses to provide for its Irises better than for its working women, it must not expect honest playwrights to manufacture spurious evidence to save its credit.  The mischief lies in the deliberate suppression of the other side of the case:  the refusal to allow Mrs Warren to expose the drudgery and repulsiveness of plying for hire among coarse, tedious drunkards; the determination not to let the Parisian girl in Brieux’s Les Avaries come on the stage and drive into people’s minds what her diseases mean for her and for themselves.  All that, says the King’s Reader in effect, is horrifying, loathsome.

Precisely:  what does he expect it to be? would he have us represent it as beautiful and gratifying?  The answer to this question, I fear, must be a blunt Yes; for it seems impossible to root out of an Englishman’s mind the notion that vice is delightful, and that abstention from it is privation.  At all events, as long as the tempting side of it is kept towards the public, and softened by plenty of sentiment and sympathy, it is welcomed by our Censor, whereas the slightest attempt to place it in the light of the policeman’s lantern or the Salvation Army shelter is checkmated at once as not merely disgusting, but, if you please, unnecessary.