DR. RICHARD BURTON, head of the department of English at the University of Minnesota, in an address recently before the Minnesota Federation of Women's Clubs, said: "The playhouse is the people's church; but instead of uplifting them and making them better men and women, it demoralizes and degrades them. The theater as it now exists is a half-way house to hell. Unless we take care of the unoccupied hours of our men and women, we shall have the same problem as did France at the end of the eighteenth century." There are a great many people who are very urgently commending the theater, because of various interests that they may have in it, often-times of a financial character; but the careful thinkers of the nation can not fail to see that the theater has become an agency of the most awful demoralization.