In just the same way, I want the unfaithful husband or the
unfaithful wife in a farcical comedy not to bother me with their
divorce cases or the stratagems they employ to avoid a divorce
case, but to tell me how and why married couples are unfaithful.
I don't want to hear the lies they tell one another to conceal
what they have done, but the truths they tell one another when
they have to face what they have done without concealment or
excuse. No doubt prudent and considerate people conceal such
adventures, when they can, from those who are most likely to be
wounded by them; but it is not to be presumed that, when found
out, they necessarily disgrace themselves by irritating lies and
transparent subterfuges.

My playlet, which I offer as a model to all future writers of
farcical comedy, may now, I hope, be read without shock. I may
just add that Mr. Sibthorpe Juno's view that morality demands,
not that we should behave morally (an impossibility to our sinful
nature) but that we shall not attempt to defend our immoralities,
is a standard view in England, and was advanced in all seriousness
by an earnest and distinguished British moralist shortly after
the first performance of Overruled. My objection to that aspect
of the doctrine of original sin is that no necessary and
inevitable operation of human nature can reasonably be regarded
as sinful at all, and that a morality which assumes the contrary
is an absurd morality, and can be kept in countenance only by
hypocrisy. When people were ashamed of sanitary problems, and
refused to face them, leaving them to solve themselves
clandestinely in dirt and secrecy, the solution arrived at was
the Black Death. A similar policy as to sex problems has solved