Theft

London published about half a dozen plays during his career, and this one, from 1910, sets a reformer against a fortune. The action runs some twenty hours in Washington, D.C., where Howard Knox, a congressman from Oregon, prepares a speech exposing the industrial magnate Anthony Starkweather. Senator Chalmers and the journalist Ellery Jackson Hubbard scheme to discredit him before he can deliver it. The incriminating letters in Knox’s hands are themselves stolen goods, lifted from Starkweather’s private files, and they change hands more than once before the last act. Caught in the middle is Margaret Chalmers, the senator’s wife and Starkweather’s daughter. The title carries the argument: Knox calls accumulated wealth theft, and naming it plainly is what makes him dangerous. The play went unstaged in London’s lifetime.