family of moderate
means an evening of innocent enjoyment which may be had together and at
small expense. Properly regulated, it is an offset to the saloon and a
positive medium of good influence.

Such a commendation, however, can safely be made for those communities
only which take the pains to censor all films before exhibition is
permitted. In less than two years the censorship bureau of Chicago has
excluded one hundred and thirteen miles of objectionable films. It
should be said also that the vaudeville, which now often accompanies the
nickel and dime shows, is usually coarse and sometimes immoral. The
music, alas, speaks for itself and constitutes a sorry sort of education
except in the foreign quarters of our great cities where, in conformity
to a better taste, it becomes classic and valuable.

But to describe a typical film of the better sort and to indicate its
practical use may have some suggestive value for wide-awake ministers
who wish to turn to good account every legitimate social agency. During
the Christmas season of 1911 the following film story was set forth to
vast audiences of people with telling effect: In a wretched hovel you
see a lame mother with three pale children. The rich young landlord
comes to collect rent and is implored to improve the place. This he
refuses to do because of his small returns on the property. He departs.
The father of the family returns from work. They eat the bread of the
desolate.

The landlord marries and sets out on an ocean voyage with his bride. On
the same ship the father of the tubercular family, working as stoker or
deck hand, reaches the last stages of the disease and in his dying hours
is mercifully attended by the bride. She contracts the disease and later
appears weak and fading. The husband, ascertaining the real nature of
her malady, brings her home with the purpose of placing her in the
private sanitarium. There is no room in this institution, but good
accommodations are found in the public sanitarium to which she goes and
where she finds the children from their tenement.

The facts have now been put in such juxtaposition that the husband has a
change of heart. The patients recover and the landlord endows a great
sanitarium for the tuberculous. One may easily criticize the crudeness
of the plot and the improbabilities with which it bristles. But it sets
forth love and death and conversion and an appeal to rescue those who
suffer from the great white pla