In this country political corruption and the grasping spirit of corporations are constantly affording the demagogue or the dreamer opportunity to preach the destruction of civil order with great plausibility, giving scope to reckless theorists who have so often, in the world’s history, baffled the endeavours of the rational and patient liberalists of their day.

This excited in me an ardent desire to do what little I could as a dramatist to counteract what seemed to me the poisonous influences of these hidden forces:  to write a play which might throw some light on the goal of destruction to which these influences inevitably lead, whenever the agitation between capital and labour accepts the leadership of anarchism.

The time chosen by me was that of the Terror in France, 1793-94, during which the noble fruits of the French Revolution came near to annihilation, thanks to the supremacy, for a time, of a small band of anarchical men who, in the name of liberty, invoked the tyranny of terror.

The hero of my play, Paul Kauvar, has for his prototype Camille Desmoulins, one of the most conspicuous and sincere sons of liberty of his day, who—­in spite of his magnificent devotion to freedom—­when he dared oppose the Jacobins, was beheaded at the guillotine—­a martyr to national, as distinct from personal, liberty.

The typical anarchist in my play is portrayed in Carrac, whose prototype was Thomas Carier, sent into La Vendee as a representative of the Jacobin convention.  It was this man who, without process of law, guillotined or destroyed most horribly over one hundred thousand innocent men, women, and children—­in the name of liberty.  He it was who invented the “republican marriage”—­the drowned bodies of whose naked victims dammed the river Loire, and rendered its water pestilential.

    The Duc de Beaumont portrays a type of the true noblesse of
    France—­proud, fearless, often unjust, never ignoble.

    Gouroc depicts the intriguing type of noblesse whose egotism
    and cruelty engendered the tyranny of the monarchy, and
    justified its destruction.

    The prototype of General Delaroche was the brave and generous
    Henri de la Rochejacquelin, young leader of the royalists in
    La Vendee.

By the interplay of these types, I have sought to emphasize what is truly heroic in the struggle which must ensue in all times between men and classes possessed of differing ideas.  Especially it is the purpose of my play to remind the American masses, by the history of the past, not to assist foreign influences to repeat that history on this continent in the future.

A sound attitude, and one supported now (1920) daily in the conservative press, whenever I.W.W. and Bolshevist demonstrations shake the country!  But “Paul Kauvar” is, to-day, not the kind of drama to drive home the lesson; fashions have changed.