III. In that year, 1860, the "Grate American Humorist" was representing the Cleveland Plain Dealer so there would be good sense and better nonsense in making him the interviewer of "Freedom" at Castle Garden. After animated discussion the Artemus Ward idea was rejected, and my Collaborator, when he had presented a well-turnedcompliment to me on a book that my namesake in the Print Room of the British Museum, London, had written, said "But I do want some specimens of the colloquialisms and slang of 1860. I should be infinitely obliged (you do these things so well) if would look through the newspapers of that period, and make a list of some racy specimens of slang."

you

"Ah," I reflected, "it's facts he wants."

That evening, while I was relating to my wife my experiences as collaborator on "Freedom," I said

"This silly Great War has changed everything. In the old days I was the genius and people used to feed me with facts. Now, Teddie is the genius, and I feed him with facts."

ACT I

ENGLAND IN THE MAKING

From "The Free Man," circa 500 A.D.,
to "The Peasants' Insurrection," 1381.

T

HIS play is a dream, yet it is not a dream, because events happen in it that really happened: these events were witnessed in a dream by Dick Freeman, aged 12, and his cousin, Hank Archer, aged 10. When Freedom, in the form of a woman, deathless and eternally beautiful, enters the cottage bedroom in Westchester County, in answer to Hank's question "What Freedom?" she proceeds to tell the boys who she is, and then to show them what men and women have done for her, and against her, through the pomp and circumstance, the glamour and the grief of AngloSaxon history; she shows them salient deeds, now splendid and magnificent, now cruel and mean; but slowly tending upward, as the centuries sweep by, to higher ideals, and a profounder sense of justice. The strange scenes that the boys witness

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and the stirring things they hear become to them a reality, not a dream. When they awake in the last scene of the last act you feel that they are not the same boys. They have found the New Knowledge. Their dream will accompany them through the business of life. Always with them will march Freedom whom they have learnt to know and to love.

The father of Richard Freeman (Dick) died for Freedom. That is the note of the first scene. He is an orphan. This numbing fact depresses the boy, but he hardly understands the full significance of his father's sacrifice. "Are you glad, ma'am, my Daddy died for you?" he asks Freedom. She, knowing that the boy's father was one of those gallant Americans who threw themselves into the ranks of the Allies at the outbreak of the war, answers-"There is no death for such as your Daddy, dear."

Then Dick begins to comprehend that his father has made the great sacrifice for the great mother of all. Freedom, glorying in her motherhood,

says

"I am the mother of all the races if they will but know me. The Mother of your land and the Mother of Exiles. I am the History of the Old World and the New. I am the History of The

United States. Come, I will show you some of my pages."

Then, accompanied by the two boys, Dick and Hank, she steps down from the Present into the black Past—that black past which, at her call, will glow with light and movement, and portray, in chronological procession, the events of AngloSaxon History which have made for Freedom.

The shutters of the bedroom in Westchester County, New York, part. "I open the book," cries Freedom,-"the light is growing-let us read one of the first pages of your history."

As she speaks the radiance extends, and they see, their hands clutched tight in the hands of Freedom, a Farmer Commonwealth in England about the year 500 A.D. In the midst of the clearing rises the Moot Hill, crowned by its Sacred tree, the place of assembly for the Wise Men of the Village.

Throughout the play, at appropriate intervals, Freedom and the boys discuss each scene, with Hank's pert ejaculations, and Dick's more serious comments. Freedom explains to the boys that from these Moot Hill meetings, "sprang your Capitol, and your President." She could also have quoted the eloquent words of John Richard Green, (throughout this "Commentary" the pas

sages quoted, when not otherwise indicated, are from Green's "Short History of the English People"), about these Farmer Commonwealths of Free Men.

"The basis of their society was the free landholder. He was the 'free necked man,' whose long hair floated over a neck that had never bent to a lord. . It is with a reverence such as is stirred by the headwaters of some mighty river that one looks back to those tiny Moots, where the men of the village met, as their descendants, the men of a later England, meet in Parliament at Westminster, to frame laws and justice for the great empire which has sprung from this little body of farmer-commonwealths."

Obviously man's struggle for Freedom really began when man first became a social animalsocial but unmoral. Society begat visiting, intercourse begat envy. The desire for possession followed the Have-nots were envious of the Haves -then Theft, Grab, Militarism, Tyranny, Usurpation and the unending fight of Democracy against Despotism. But for the purposes of our play we start the struggle about the year 500 A.D., an arbitrary date, but sufficiently accurate to placate cross historians.

By that date the Romans had left Britain near