This year the Lebanese Women's League did not confine its attention to humanitarian social works, or to building projects, but went beyond them into the field of art. Through its efforts, the cultured elite of Beirut was able to see the play "They Deceived You," by the great playwright and stage director Mr. Farid Medawar, on the stage of West Hall at the American University. It was performed four times in the space of a single week, under the patronage of His Excellency the President and his honorable wife, and the unanimity of appreciation and admiration for it reached a pitch seldom attained by anything in this country before.

I am not here to review the play afresh, after the greater part of the lovers of this art have seen it, and after the newspapers have spoken of it with the utmost praise. But I must say that this play carried the elements of success before it ever reached the stage. That is because Mr. Medawar was able to depict a

scene drawn from the very heart of our social life, exposing the evils of feudalism, favoritism, and contempt for justice, in a way that makes people recoil from such methods; then he gave the victory, in the end, to justice and humanity, so that the picture was complete with its lights and its shadows, interspersed with "touches" of jest that help to

soften the atmosphere when the crisis of injustice, or of straying from the right, grows severe.

And when he brought it to the stage, he secured specialists — amateurs though they were — who managed to carry out their roles as if they had spent their lives on the boards; nor is that strange, for the whole matter is a matter of taste.

Mrs. Layla Saad, who played the role of Nuha, succeeded in being the very model of those whom the unjust try to use for ends contrary to justice, yet who cannot kill within their souls the instinct of goodness, which appears at the end and restores to people their faith in lofty principles. Likewise, Mrs. Marie Saad was able to play the role of the mother confident in the upbringing of her children, just as Miss Hitti succeeded in bringing out the humanity of the nun, and Mr. Musa Suleiman was able to appear in the guise of the aged father, deep in his grief, deep in his tenderness — even though