Page:Emma Goldman - The Social Significance of the Modern Drama - 1914.djvu/215

 wrongs has now also found dramatic interpretation in Galsworthy's "Justice."

The play opens in the office of James How & Sons, solicitors. The senior clerk, Robert Cokeson, discovers that a check he had issued for nine pounds has been forged to ninety. By elimination, suspicion falls upon William Falder, the junior office clerk. The latter is in love with a married woman, the abused and ill-treated wife of a brutal drunkard. Pressed by his employer, a severe yet not unkindly man, Falder confesses the forgery, pleading the dire necessity of his sweetheart, Ruth Honeywill, with whom he had planned to escape to save her from the unbearable brutality of her husband.

Falder. Oh! sir, look over it! I'll pay the money back—I will, I promise.

Notwithstanding the entreaties of young Walter How, who holds modern ideas, his father, a moral and law-respecting citizen, turns Falder over to the police.

The second act, in the court room, shows Justice in the very process of manufacture. The scene equals in dramatic power and psychologic verity the great court scene in "Resurrection." Young Falder, a nervous and rather weakly youth of twenty-three, stands before the bar. Ruth, his