BOSTON HYPOCRISY

"Boston," wrote Lincoln Steffens, "has carried the practice of hypocrisy to the n-th degree of refinement, grace, and failure." In the light of Mayor Mansfield's dictum regarding Sean O'Casey's widely acclaimed drama, "Within the Gates," the judgment of the former muckraker is amply justified. His Honor the Mayor has taken it upon himself, at the urging of the Catholic Church, to brand a play termed "great" by the most experienced dramatic critics in the United States as "nothing but a dirty book full of commonplace smut."

When, O Boston, will you be freed from the pruriency and bigoted complacency of demagogues to whom the word anachronism means nothing? When will you cease to permit the discouragement of universally acknowledged art? When will you open your theatres to all that is significant and courageous in the modern drama, and thus relegate to their true position the low humor, the trivialisation of the important that you countenance in your burlesque shows? For New England's sterility in the creative arts, censorship such as you tacitly agree to is largely responsible. You have more than merited the charges of hypocrisy that have been levelled at you. Is there no end to your shameless inconsistencies?

If reports are true that Mayor Mansfield saw no objections to "Within the Gates" when he first read it some time ago, and took the stand quoted above only after visitations from the Catholic clergy, his position appears in a still more unfortunate light. But all such considerations aside, the fact remains that Bostonians have been deprived of one of the most important plays of the current season from both a technical and artistic standpoint. One of the functions of any government, whether federal or municipal, is the positive encouragement of all forms of art. What is remembered in the history of any group of people is not so much their political organizations, or even their social conditions, as their traditions and heritage, of which their contributions to the arts and sciences are the best testimonials. Posterity must indeed pity a people who submit docilely to a cultural diet administered by narrow minded zealots and hypocrites.