_Mirza_ is indeed a Person of a peculiar Taste; for a Cunning Man to own himself a Rogue to the Man he shou'd keep in ignorance, and whom he was to work to his ends, argues little pretence to that Name; but he laughs at _Honesty_, and professes himself a Knave to one he wou'd have honest to him....
In the second Act, he talks of _Memnon's_ having recourse to Arms, of which Power we have not the least Word in the first: All that we know is, that he returns from Banishment on a day of Jubilee, when all was Safe and Free....[18]
For similar reasons, Mr. Eaton criticises unfavorably _The Fighting Hope_:
One of the best (or the worst) examples of false ethics in such a play is furnished by _The Fighting Hope_, produced by Mr. Belasco in the Autumn of 1908, and acted by Miss Blanche Bates. In this play a man, Granger, has been jailed, his wife and the world believe for another man's crime. The other man, Burton Temple, is president of the bank Granger has been convicted of robbing. A district attorney, hot after men higher up, is about to reopen the case. It begins to look bad for Temple. Mrs. Granger, disguised as a stenographer, goes to his house to secure evidence against him. What she secures is a letter proving that not he, but her husband, was after all the criminal.
Of course this letter is a knockout blow for her. She realizes that the "father of her boys" is a thief, that the man she would send to jail (and with whom you know the dramatist is going to make her finally fall in love) is innocent. Still, in her first shock, her instinct to protect the "father of her boys" persists, and she burns the letter.
So far, so good, but Mrs. Granger is represented as a woman of fine instincts and character. That she should persist in cooler blood in her false and immoral supposition that her boys' name will be protected or their happiness preserved--to say nothing of her own--by the guilt of two parents instead of one, is hard to believe. Yet that is exactly what the play asks you to believe, and it asks you to assume that here is a true dilemma. A babbling old housekeeper, whose chief use in the house seems to be to help the plot along, after the manner of stage servants, tells Mrs. Granger that she must not atone for her act by giving honest testimony in court, that of course she must let an innocent man go to jail, to "save her boys' name."