The Weekly North Iowa Times

Theatres.—Some of the clergy are condemning "play-actors" as the refuse of the earth, and they charge Booth's crime to his profession. This is very unjust to a class of persons who have elevated mankind in all ages of the world. Those who can read of the Grecian scholars and actors connected with the stage, those who remember that Shakespeare was both a play-writer and actor, will have little respect for the following sentiments clipped from the published sermon of an ignorant and fanatical divine. The comments following the quotations are clipped from an exchange, and they are true in every particular.

It took John Wilkes Booth to murder President Abraham Lincoln. Common rebels and rowdies and guerrillas stood back and paled at the thought, but a miscreant stage player was found equal to this infernal task. An imagination educated to tragedy, can put its scenes in practice with but a short step in advance." All crimes are first committed in thought, and he whose thoughts are continually fed with criminal scenes deludes himself if he does not commit the deeds. Towards this, every lesson in this contemptible hypocrisy of stage playing tends. And the crime of Booth, by which he outranks the most infamous regicide of history, is but the fruits of his theatrical life,

Shakespeare punishes all his villains, and the moral of his dramatic works is that crime brings the stings of conscience, the sorrow of poverty, the curse of the world, and a tragic and dishonorable death. In brief, no uninspired author ever presented the judgements of great sins in more vivid and glowing colors. We are informed by an intelligent gentleman familiar with stage life that the lessons of Shakespeare are not lost on the profession, since Booth was the only great criminal ever educated in that school. Whatever the offense of actors, they are not distinguished for the commission of capital crimes. This fact is said to be shown especially by the criminal records of both Great Britain and France.

It is not a week since we saw a person who once pretended to be a "minister of God" at a theatre in this city, and we think he had a perfect right to be there. — Exchange