A Practical Diplomacy

Abstract

After the first performance of Sardou's political satire Rabagas at the Vaudeville theatre in Paris in 1872, President Thiers ordered the governor of Paris to forbid a second performance. I wish that after the first performance of Sardou's romantic drama Dora at Wallack's theatre in New York in April, 1878, where it was given its American name of Diplomacy, that the then mayor of New York had ordered its immediate suppression. I am soberly convinced that if the police powers of New York had been exercised for the immediate suppression of that play, it would be less difficult now to discover the elements of a constructive American foreign policy. If some of you wonder what I have said has to do with the subject upon which I have been asked to address you, I hasten to explain: not many weeks ago an artist friend of mine in New York who had found profitable occupation in drawing caricature illustrations of the tango, drew the figure of a young woman so distorted, that it was a caricature of his own caricatures. Acting upon a happy inspiration, he gave the drawing the title of the Debutante Slouch and thus it was reproduced in a popular illustrated weekly. Today a million young American women are trying to copy that illustration in their own walk and carriage and those who have an unusually supple backbone, and are highly gifted with the power of imitation, are succeeding, to the delighted surprise of observers. You see at once now the quarrel I have with Victorien Sardou's play Diplomacy. Jerome A. Hart, in one of his entertaining books, gives us a lively and comprehensive account of the plays of Sardou, and speaking of a woman character in the play, he says this of her: This young lady is a unique and fascinating person, beautiful, elegant, seductive as a fairy princess. Dora, you may recall, was unconsciously enlisted into the group of women who, Sardou would have us suppose, exist in all the large