"If an American dramatist or novelist had taken for the ground work of a play or work of fiction the story of the Bidwell family today related on another page of the Herald, all European critics would have told him that the story was too 'American, ' too vast in its outlines, too high in its colors, too merely 'big' in fact. "The story has its lesson. The play is not a mere spectacle. The lesson is that in the doing and undoing of wrong the Bidwell family expended enough ability and energy to stock a good many reigning European families for generations. "