the ticking of a clock out of sight behind the bar until the sound of measured seconds fell upon their ears with the sharpness of axe-strokes. Solomon Tinkle wiped his eyes with a blue handkerchief and blew his nose loudly.

"I suppose," said Sam Judd, "that Rutherford took hold of Bentley's then." "Not personal," said Denslow. "But he put in Klore for a barkeep, and quite a come-down it was after seein' Nancy there. But they left the old sign. Bentley wasn't seen afterwards, and Rutherford didn't come down from Boonville for a year or two, only for a trip he made once every six months to see how things was going on. He was real jokin' them days, a good man to take a drink with. But not long after he commenced to sour some, and he got nasty, they say, with men as well as animals."

"I guess," said the fat woman, "he was rich enough then to own some. He was a mean man to the animals he owned. -Mr. Denslow, would you make kind with another glass? With a squirt from the other half of that lemon?"

"Surely," said Denslow, getting up and going to the bar. He turned up the lamp and rummaged about.

"Jeepers!" said Solomon Tinkle, all at once. "Jeepers! Nancy was a pretty gal! Outside of you, Lucy, she was the only gal I ever wanted to live with."

Mrs. Gurget patted out her skirt and made eyes at him so brightly that he caught his breath. She tilted her chin to a laugh.

"Go along," she said.

"I wonder who it was bought Nancy Haskins," said Sam Judd. "Nor why she never come back."

Denslow called to them from behind the bar.

"Say," he cried excitedly, "I got one of them perfumery calendars right here."

He held up a thin cardboard and a glint of yellow flashed under the lamp.

"Let's see it," said Mrs. Gurget, rising from her chair and going over to the lamp. The others crowded behind her.

"She must have been right pretty," exclaimed Sam, looking over the heavy shoulder.

"No wonder they bid high for her," said Denslow.

"Three hundred dollars is a lot of cash," said Sam. "It seems strange that anybody'd've had it there. He must have been rich."

"Nobody, only me," said Solomon Tinkle, "could have showed that all to once; and me, I was up the Rome road gettin' it. Nancy'd said the day before she was goin' to auction herself. But the mail-guard winged me as I was gettin' away" he pressed his trouser-leg tight over his knotted right knee-"and I got back too slow. There couldn't have been no one else. . . . Only Rutherford." "Jeepers!" said Denslow, half under his breath.

"He's dead now," said Sam Judd.
"Uncommon," said Joe.

"You ought to have seen her," said Solomon Tinkle, with a whine in his voice. "You ought to've seen her dance. She was the prettiest gal I ever see. . . .”

The fat woman whirled round on her heels, and her skirt fluttered slightly, flirting with her ankles. She held the picture of the girl in red and yellow in front of her for him to see, and looked down over the top at him.

"She was real pretty," she said, glancing at the dancer's face. "Look at her hair, kind of soft and yeller. And the smile to her mouth."

The little man leaned forward, one hand resting on the bar to steady his bowed legs, his thin nose drooping in reminiscence, and gazed for several seconds. The others watched him silently.

"She was a real pretty gal," said Mrs. Gurget, and her broad mouth curved miraculously between her fat cheeks. Solomon looked up at her.

"Prettiest gal I ever see," he said, the whine in his voice pronounced. "There won't none of us see the like of her again."

The fat woman laid the perfumery calendar face down upon the bar. Denslow handed her her glass of gin with a touch of water from the kettle, and she spread her nostrils over the sharp odor of lemon.

"What I would like to know," he said, "is who killed old Rutherford, anyhow?” "That's it," said Mrs. Gurget, as they all sat down again, "who did?"

In any case, the motion-picture exists. Grown to a degree which makes it as much a part of modern life as is the daily press, of more national importance than the legitimate stage, it even compares with the church in the number of its devotees; and more than the church it stimulates public interest in its personnel and the details of its management. Foreign nations are worrying about the influence of American pictures upon their innocent populations, and if their complaints are justified, it would seem that the American movie is destined to upset the world as much as our part in the late war has upset Europe.

Whether the movie may yet be called an art is a question still under discussion. Those who are busy perfecting the craft have little time for academic argument; the point in which they are most interested is whether the motion-picture will be allowed to develop under conditions which will insure its becoming an art, or whether it is to be arbitrarily limited within such narrow boundaries as to drive from it those men and women of true creative force, without whose efforts there is little chance of the screen ever growing beyond its well-known and much-advertised infancy.

To-day the condition of the world in general, and of the United States in particular, marks a crisis in the age-old struggle between honest thought and prescribed belief; radicals tend to become too radical and those who would restrain them too tyrannous. Laws are passed by

History, as we know it, is largely a matter of patriotic propaganda; but the student who looks a bit beneath the surface begins to doubt that the world has made its best progress when its thought was legally dominated by its "upper classes."

It has taken us some centuries to break away from chivalry; a system which found it desirable to put woman upon a pedestal rather than grant her equal social rights. We have not yet discarded economic theories which permit the chosen few to own the earth and charge the rest of the human race for its use. Many voices are interpreting the word of God, each claiming to possess the only authentic version; and throughout the land proper authority must pass upon all published thought to certify that it is the same kind which mother used to make.

Into a world so constituted enters a new art under the guise of entertainment; an art so broad in its appeal, so potentially powerful in its effect upon the mass, that it is at once recognized as a social force, then feared as such, and immediately harnessed to the chariot of convention lest it be dangerously stimulating to new ideas.

Much has been said and written of the effect the motion-picture has upon our national life. The movie has been accused of debauching the young and has been held largely accountable for whatever criminal tendencies any of us may possess. The very idea upon which censorship is based is that an audience cannot see upon the screen anything illegal, immoral, or disgusting without being them

But to hold this view is to confuse cause and effect; for, like the stage, the screen can only influence public thought if it is in basic agreement with popular ideals.

Drama, on the screen or on the stage, is primarily an effect of public thought rather than a cause of it. A picture to succeed must reflect the life and ideals of its audience; it must formulate public opinion before it can form public thought. That is why the screen can never be a menace to the righteousness of the nation. The public is not easily influenced away from its ideals. This is not to say that the American people as a whole is quite as prudish as its leading bigots, though it is content to accept a somewhat narrow conception of what is "proper" or "improper," and tends to put its faith in blanket rules by which every individual must be judged. America sees its moral values in black and white, so whatever is not pure white is, necessarily, jet black.

This point of view, however, is intrinsic in the public. It is not the result of any law or regulation; it represents the native decency of the race. Even the efforts of the puritanical, through blue laws, have not been able to drive this race into any great degree of immorality. The American people is a clean people and will never tolerate anything really indecent in its theatres or on its screens.

It has always been futile to tell the public what it may or may not have in the theatre. The people have always demanded what they wanted-and have always got what they demanded-and they have never wanted drama which disagreed too much with their own sense of life's values. It has always been most unprofitable to present plays whose ideals varied from those of the audience. Even the so-called "indecent" plays on the New York stage, if really indecent, die quickly. Big cities may furnish for a few weeks an audience of the morbidly curious, largely people from out of town who vote for censorship at home and come to Broadway for moral relaxation. But the country as a whole does not like these plays. And this is even more true of the screen, whose larger audience is, in

ican and much simpler in its tastes.

This larger public needs no protection other than its own power to reject pictures which it disapproves. Yet it is this public itself which has caused the motionpicture to be bound by all those limitations and restrictions which are making development of the art so difficult.

The operation of censorship, important as it is in itself, has even greater significance when we realize that censorship is in fact the delegation of public taste to a small committee; the voluntary abandonment by the public of its right to approve or disapprove its own entertainment. It robs the producer of the personal audience-reaction to his picture, which is the only compass by which he can safely stéer.

It is useless for makers of pictures to complain of the censors' arbitrary acts as long as the public consents that these few men and women shall stand as an artificial barrier between producer and audience; and it must be admitted that censorship exists largely because the public is too lazy to chaperon its own children, and because it is content to have its thinking predigested and stamped with an official seal. Food for thought, like food for the body, must be examined by the proper authorities and found pure before it can be sold.

Under such safeguards as these it is idle to speak of any evil effect of the motion-picture upon the public mind. To the student, indeed, it would seem that the boot is on the other foot; that it is rather the influence of the public upon the motion-picture which is to be deplored. If there is any answer to that much-agitated question, “What's wrong with the movies?" let us not condemn too hastily the rash soul who ventures to suggest that the fault may lie with the public. When we consider the outside pressure brought to bear upon those who make pictures— the enforced limitations; the legal, moral, social, and political inhibitions; the rules, regulations, and restrictions under which producers are forced to work-we can hardly blame the producer who cries despairingly that instead of the motionpicture making criminals of the public, it is the public which is making an artistic criminal of the motion-picture.

Many people are willing, even eager, to cure the motion-picture of its ills; they have various operations to suggest, which might be entirely successful except that the patient would undoubtedly die. For the cultured layman, in considering the situation, does not see that the problem has its roots in the fact that motionpictures must be popular if they are to live. The more an art depends upon public approval, the more it has to reflect the ideas and ideals of the public which supports it, and not the ideas of the intellectuals who know what the public should think rather than what it does think.

The theatre has never been a good place in which to introduce new problems or new philosophies. Not until the public is already thinking about a subject can it be successfully used as a major motive in the theatre, and this is even more true of the screen. Neither is this the fault of the dramatist nor of the picture-producer; it is the will of the people, and makers of motion-pictures are servants of the people and must give satisfaction or take their notice.

And the public gives picture-makers only one general order-that it be entertained. It does not demand to be educated, neither does it clamor to be improved; least of all does it desire to be reformed. But it does want to be interested and amused, appealed to through the emotions and not through the intellect.

This order, simple as it is, gives the producer plenty of latitude; for entertainment may be vulgar or refined, coarse or exquisite, humorous or merely funny. Commentators on the films are frequently misled by the success of a crude picture into thinking that crudity is the cause of its success. But an equal success may be scored by a beautifully delicate piece of work; which is fair ground for the conclusion that if the entertainment values are there, if a picture is humanly interesting or amusing, it will succeed either with or without artistic treatment. It is well to note, however, that the greatest successes of the screen have been among its most artistic efforts.

But the producer, though limited by the imagination of the majority, is prevented from stimulating that imagination VOL. LXXXI.-23

because of various rules and regulations whfch the public itself has sanctioned in order to eliminate the danger of new thought. The world seems terribly afraid to think it is so much easier, so much safer, to believe.

Thus it is that the artist is hampered by limitation of theme and of treatment. He is constantly tempted to produce a story in which he sees great values, and then, having to meet the limitations which the public imposes, he is forced to spoil the very story he delighted in; to rob it of its major values, and put upon the screen an empty husk, having certain superficial points of similarity with the original subject, but with its very soul removed. This is tragic, because the picture is frequently worse than if the producer had chosen an inferior story in which such value as it had could be retained upon the screen.

In the case of that excellent German film, "Variety," the original version showed a man, fascinated by a siren, leaving his wife and child and devoting his life to the alluring charmer, who in turn betrays him. He reaps the reward of his infidelity and is punished for deserting a faithful wife to follow an unworthy paramour.

In order to make this story offend American sensibilities as little as possible, the wife and child are eliminated from the story; the siren is shown at the beginning firmly bound to the hero in lawful wedlock, and the poor hero has to suffer for resenting the unfaithfulness of his wife. This distortion is for the purpose of legalizing love scenes between the man and the woman; scenes which could not well be omitted if there were to be any picture at all. The world is full of people who think it is more delicate to use perfume instead of soap.

The frequently demanded "motionpicture for the few" is no answer to the problem. Motion-pictures "for the few" would probably be even more unimportant than drama for the few. For drama at least may have a value as literature which, up to now, the motion-picture has not. Indeed, the problem lies in the very fact that the motion-picture, to be important, must be considered in terms of the mass-or not at all. Motion-pictures