trance fee. The dominant genius of the moving
picture place is not a gentleman with a red nose and an eye like a dead
fish, but some producer who, with all his faults, has given every person
in the audience a seven-leagued angel-and-demon telescope.

Since I have announced myself a farmer and a puritan, let me here list
the saloon evils not yet recorded in this chapter. They are separate from
the catalogue of the individualistic woes of the drunkard that are given
in the Scripture. The shame of the American drinking place is the
bar-tender who dominates its thinking. His cynical and hardened soul
wipes out a portion of the influence of the public school, the library,
the self-respecting newspaper. A stream rises no higher than its source,
and through his dead-fish eye and dead-fish brain the group of tired men
look upon all the statesmen and wise ones of the land. Though he says
worse than nothing, his furry tongue, by endless reiteration, is the
American slum oracle. At the present the bar-tender handles the
neighborhood group, the ultimate unit in city politics.

So, good citizen, welcome the coming of the moving picture man as a local
social force. Whatever his private character, the mere formula of his
activities makes him a better type. He may not at first sway his group in
a directly political way, but he will make himself the centre of more
social ideals than the bar-tender ever entertained. And he is beginning
to have as intimate a relation to his public as the bar-tender. In many
cases he stands under his arch in the sheltered lobby and is on
conversing terms with his habitual customers, the length of the afternoon
and evening.

Voting the saloon out of the slums by voting America dry, does not, as of
old, promise to be a successful operation that kills the patient. In the
past some of the photoplay magazines have contained denunciations of the
temperance people for refusing to say anything in behalf of the greatest
practical enemy of the saloon. But it is not too late for the dry forces
to repent. The Anti-Saloon League officers and the photoplay men should
ask each other to dinner. More moving picture theatres in doubtful
territory will help make dry voters. And wet territory voted dry will
bring about a greatly accelerated patronage of the photoplay houses.
There is every strategic reason why these two forces should patch up a
truce.

Meanwhile, the cave-man, reader of picture-writing, is given a chance t