Preface - Page 2

"ordure," and thus enforce silence as to the far-reaching
fact that you cannot cheapen women in the market for industrial
purposes without cheapening them for other purposes as well. I
hope Mrs Warren's Profession will be played everywhere, in season
and out of season, until Mrs Warren has bitten that fact into the
public conscience, and shamed the newspapers which support a
tariff to keep up the price of every American commodity except
American manhood and womanhood.

Unfortunately, Mr Daly had already suffered the usual fate of
those who direct public attention to the profits of the sweater
or the pleasures of the voluptuary. He was morally lynched side
by side with me. Months elapsed before the decision of the courts
vindicated him; and even then, since his vindication implied the
condemnation of the press, which was by that time sober again,
and ashamed of its orgy, his triumph received a rather sulky and
grudging publicity. In the meantime he had hardly been able to
approach an American city, including even those cities which had
heaped applause on him as the defender of hearth and home when he
produced Candida, without having to face articles discussing
whether mothers could allow their daughters to attend such plays
as You Never Can Tell, written by the infamous author of Mrs
Warren's Profession, and acted by the monster who produced it.
What made this harder to bear was that though no fact is better
established in theatrical business than the financial
disastrousness of moral discredit, the journalists who had done
all the mischief kept paying vice the homage of assuming that it
is enormously popular and lucrative, and that I and Mr Daly,
being exploiters of vice, must therefore be making colossal
fortunes out of the abuse heaped on us, and had in fact provoked
it and welcomed it with that express object. Ignorance of real
life could hardly go further.

One consequence was that Mr Daly could not have kept his
financial engagements or maintained his hold on the public had he
not accepted engagements to appear for a season in the vaudeville
theatres [the American equivalent of our music halls], where he
played How He Lied to Her Husband comparatively unhampered by the
press censorship of the theatre, or by that sophistication of the
audience through press suggestion from which I suffer more,
perhaps, than any other author. Vaudeville authors are
fortunately unknown: the audiences see what the play contains and
what the actor can do, not what the papers have told them to
expect. Success under such circumstances had a value both for Mr
Daly and myself which did something to console us for the very
unsavory mobbing which the New York press organized for us, and
which was not the