ndyll of the production, does not
enter the story soon enough, and is too James K. Hacketty all at once. We
are jerked into admiration of him, rather than ensnared. But after that
the gentleman behaves more handsomely than any of the distinguished
lieutenant governors in real life the present writer happens to remember.
The figure of Aunt Jane, the queenly serious woman of affairs, is one to
admire and love. Her effectiveness without excess or strain is in itself
an argument for giving woman the vote. The newspaper notice does not
state the facts in saying the symbolical figure "fades out" at critical
periods in the plot. On the contrary, she appears at critical periods,
clothed in white, solemn and royal. She comes into the groups with an
adequate allurement, pointing the moral of each situation while she
shines brightest. The two children for whom the contest is fought are
winsome little girls. By the side of their mother in the garden or in the
nursery they are a potent argument for the natural rights of femininity.
The film is by no means ultra-aesthetic. The implications of the clipping
are correct to that degree. But the resources of beauty within the ready
command of the advising professional producer are used by the women for
all they are worth. It could not be asked of them that they evolve
technical novelties.

Yet the figures of Aunt Jane and the Goddess of Suffrage are something
new in their fashion. Aunt Jane is a spiritual sister to that
unprecedented woman, Jane Addams, who went to the Hague conference for
Peace in the midst of war, which heroic action the future will not
forget. Aunt Jane does justice to that breed of women amid the sweetness
and flowers and mere scenario perils of the photoplay story. The presence
of the "Votes for Women" figure is the beginning of a line of photoplay
goddesses that serious propaganda in the new medium will make part of the
American Spiritual Hierarchy. In the imaginary film of Our Lady
Springfield, described in the chapter on Architecture-in-Motion, a
kindred divinity is presumed to stand by the side of the statue when it
first reaches the earth.

High-minded graduates of university courses in sociology and schools of
philanthropy, devout readers of The Survey, The Chicago Public, The
Masses, The New Republic, La Follette's, are going to advocate
increasingly, their varied and sometimes contradictory causes, in films.
These will generally be produced by heroic exertio