Daborne's needs, however, may have induced
him to prize unduly "the bird in the hand." Still his brother-authors
held similar views on the subject. They, too, disliked the overplus
system, while the managers as resolutely favoured it. So that, apart
from the consideration that poverty clings to certainty because it
cannot afford speculation, and that, to the literary character
especially, a present payment of a specified sum is always more
precious than possible undefined profits in the future, we may
conclude that the overplus system generally told to the advantage of
the managers. In the end the labourers had to yield to the
capitalists; indeed, they could make little stand against them.
Authors have never manifested much faculty for harmonious combination,
and a literary strike was no more conceivable then than now. In time a
chance of the overplus became hardly separable from the method of
paying dramatists. It was thought, perhaps, that better works would
be produced by the writers who were made in some sort dependent for
profit upon the success of their plays and partners in the ventures of
the managers.
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