outgrowth of excessive poverty and despotism in the Old
World--were insinuating themselves into the hearts and minds
of American labourers to an extent perilous to their own
prosperity and to the very life of the republic.

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