news on the
second page, and fifty letters come in about it that night, next month
when that character of news reappears it gets the front page. Some human
peculiarities are not mentioned, some phrases not used. The total
attribute of the blue-pencil man is diplomacy. But while the motion
pictures come out every day, they get their discipline months afterwards
in the legislation that insists on everything but tact. A tentative
substitute for the letters that come to the editor, the personal call and
cancelled subscription, and the rest, is the system of balloting on the
picture, especially the answer to the question, "What picture seen here
this month, or this week, shall we bring back?" Experience will teach how
to put the queries. By the same system the public might dictate its own
cut-outs. Let us have a democracy and a photoplay business working in
daily rhythm.

CHAPTER XV

THE SUBSTITUTE FOR THE SALOON

This is a special commentary on chapter five, The Picture of Crowd
Splendor. It refers as well to every other type of moving picture that
gets into the slum. But the masses have an extraordinary affinity for the
Crowd Photoplay. As has been said before, the mob comes nightly to behold
its natural face in the glass. Politicians on the platform have swayed
the mass below them. But now, to speak in an Irish way, the crowd takes
the platform, and looking down, sees itself swaying. The slums are an
astonishing assembly of cave-men crawling out of their shelters to
exhibit for the first time in history a common interest on a tremendous
scale in an art form. Below the cliff caves were bar rooms in endless
lines. There are almost as many bar rooms to-day, yet this new thing
breaks the lines as nothing else ever did. Often when a moving picture
house is set up, the saloon on the right hand or the left declares
bankruptcy.

Why do men prefer the photoplay to the drinking place? For no pious
reason, surely. Now they have fire pouring into their eyes instead of
into their bellies. Blood is drawn from the guts to the brain. Though the
picture be the veriest mess, the light and movement cause the beholder to
do a little reptilian thinking. After a day's work a street-sweeper
enters the place, heavy as King Log. A ditch-digger goes in, sick and
surly. It is the state of the body when many men drink themselves into
insensibility. But here the light is as strong in the eye as whiskey in
the throat. Along with the flar