DR. JONATHAN

By Winston Churchill


A Play in Three Acts

PREFACE




This play was written during the war. But owing to the fact that several
managers politely declined to produce it, it has not appeared on any
stage. Now, perhaps, its theme is more timely, more likely to receive
the attention it deserves, when the smoke of battle has somewhat cleared.
Even when the struggle with Germany and her allies was in progress it was
quite apparent to the discerning that the true issue of the conflict was
one quite familiar to American thought, of self-determination. On
returning from abroad toward the end of 1917 I ventured into print with
the statement that the great war had every aspect of a race with
revolution. Subliminal desires, subliminal fears, when they break down
the censor of law, are apt to inspire fanatical creeds, to wind about
their victims the flaming flag of a false martyrdom. Today it is on the
knees of the gods whether the insuppressible impulses for human freedom
that come roaring up from the subliminal chaos, fanned by hunger and
hate, are to thrash themselves out in anarchy and insanity, or to take an
ordered, intelligent and conscious course. Of the Twentieth Century,
industrial democracy is the watchword, even as political democracy was
the watchword of the two centuries that preceded it. Economic power is