This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE NEW THEATER
101

certificates the coupons from which may be used as tickets from week to week. By an additional payment of ten francs, an original purchaser may renew his subscription after he has used his first twenty-five tickets. I need not enter into detail as to Morel's methods of easy payment, which he has further simplified by reducing expenses. This he has done by discounting authors' royalties and suggesting a reform in the Public Charities' taxes, which under the present system make a People's Theater almost impossible to run. "And finally," he concludes, "we are not establishing a charitable institution; but we must have a system whereby very few families would be too poor to go to the theater; and, consequently, the theater, far from being a luxury, would actually develop a sense of thrift and economy."

The renewal of subscriptions under this system would naturally reduce the income for the following year, but now it will be seen that the People's Theater is not a single isolated institution. "The moment it succeeds the profits must go to the founding of another theater, in a different neighborhood. In this way, a play will no longer be performed only seven days, but fourteen, and the capital required for the foundation of the original theater replaced out of the profits of the second. The second, then, making use of the material as well as the actors of the first, will have no trouble in starting, and will be further enabled to profit by the experience of the one before it. The use of the