It is too easy to produce an unprovoked murder, an inexplicable arson, neither led up to nor followed by the ordinary human history of such acts, and therefore as arbitrary as the deeds of idiots or the insane.  A villainous hate, an alleged love, a violent death, are flashed at us, without being in any sort of tableau logic.  The public is ceaselessly played upon by tactless devices.  Therefore it howls, just as children in the nursery do when the awkward governess tries the very thing the diplomatic governess, in reasonable time, may bring about.

The producer has the man in the audience who cares for the art peculiarly at his mercy.  Compare him with the person who wants to read a magazine for an evening.  He can look over all the periodicals in the local book-store in fifteen minutes.  He can select the one he wants, take this bit of printed matter home, go through the contents, find the three articles he prefers, get an evening of reading out of them, and be happy.  Every day as many photoplays come to our town as magazines come to the book-store in a week or a month.  There are good ones and bad ones buried in the list.  There is no way to sample the films.  One has to wait through the first third of a reel before he has an idea of the merits of a production, his ten cents is spent, and much of his time is gone.  It would take five hours at least to find the best film in our town for one day.  Meanwhile, nibbling and sampling, the seeker would run such a gantlet of plot and dash and chase that his eyes and patience would be exhausted.  Recently there returned to the city for a day one of Griffith’s best Biographs, The Last Drop of Water.  It was good to see again.  In order to watch this one reel twice I had to wait through five others of unutterable miscellany.

Since the producers and theatre-managers have us at their mercy, they are under every obligation to consider our delicate susceptibilities—­granting the proposition that in an ideal world we will have no legal censorship.  As to what to do in this actual nation, let the reader follow what John Collier has recently written in The Survey.  Collier was the leading force in founding the National Board of Censorship.  As a member of that volunteer extra-legal board which is independent and high minded, yet accepted by the leading picture companies, he is able to discuss legislation in a manner which the present writer cannot hope to match.  Read John Collier.  But I wish to suggest that the ideal censorship is that to which the daily press is subject, the elastic hand of public opinion, if the photoplay can be brought as near to newspaper conditions in this matter as it is in some others.