We may cite a single example which may serve as an inspiration to other public-spirited women.

A few weeks before her death, Mary Graham Jones, of Hartford, Connecticut, who did so much during her life for the betterment of child life and neighborhood life in her native city, submitted to the city authorities a plan for providing small local playgrounds for young children in various parts of the city. Her scheme was that each playground should be near enough to its neighborhood to make it convenient and safe for the children to reach and use it. The report recommended the leasing from the city at nominal rent of a dozen or more vacant lots, the preparation of the lots to be in the hands of the park department and their supervision in the hands of the department of education.

The juvenile commission of Hartford petitioned the board of aldermen for permission to lease these lots and for an appropriation to pay for their support. The request was granted, and $2,500 was allowed for the first year’s expense. Nearly all this sum was expended and the work was carried out under the supervision of the superintendent of parks, with various successful results. It seems highly probable that the work will be continued another summer and perhaps something may be done during the winter to provide for skating and like sports.

Thus the citizens of Hartford feel that Miss Jones has left their children a city-wide playground system as an enduring legacy. The Mary Graham Jones Playground is the name given by the North Street Settlement of Hartford to a place set aside for all neighborhood children under nine years of age. Miss Jones had spent sixteen years in settlement and child welfare work in Hartford. In 1900 she became headworker of the North Street Settlement.^[18]

In a history of the playground movement in America, Herbert H. Weir, one of the field secretaries of the Playground and Recreation Association of America, says: “No age has been without its visioners who saw the light and led the way, so luckily there were men and women, especially women, who saw and understood and acted.”^[19]

The history of their work for playgrounds shows that like almost all modern social endeavor, there has been, first, private demonstration of a public utility, then city control, then state-wide legislation to bring backward communities into line with forward urban movement. Women have everywhere been largely instrumental in initiating the playground work, they have followed it in many cases by service on appointed commissions and as paid city playground employees, and in other cases they have held positions on state recreation commissions.

Interesting and important as has been the work of individual women in this great battle for adequate recreation in cities, it is of course the associations of women that have been most powerful and determined. For an instance of the associated effort of women, we may turn to the experience of Winthrop, Massachusetts.

When the cities and towns of Massachusetts were voting on the playground referendum during the fall of 1908 and the spring of 1909, Winthrop, just outside of Boston, seemed to regret that her 7,034 people did not entitle her to a similar privilege. The people of Winthrop, however, are ingenious, and they set about seeing what might any way be done, for they were not willing to give up the idea of having playgrounds. They, particularly the women, proceeded to agitate along many lines. At a town meeting in the spring, when the towns of over 10,000 were voting on the referendum, the people inserted warrants for various appropriations for playground purposes. A special committee was appointed to consider the entire question of parks and playgrounds and report in the fall. The committee gave hearings during the summer, and went extensively into the question of the town’s development, its future needs, its peculiar nature (because of the large areas of marsh land), available sites, and so on.

In the meantime the people kept busy. They decided to conduct an experimental playground during the summer so as to gather experience, show what could be done and develop public sentiment. The Woman’s Club, the Improvement Association, the Arts and Crafts Society, the Woman’s Equal Suffrage League, apparently every organization got into the action and did valiant work. The School Committee gave the use of a convenient school yard, with a pond and suitable open area. The societies mentioned provided the apparatus; money was raised to employ a supervisor; articles such as magazines, books, toys, games, raffia, sewing materials, scissors, shovels and hoes, were solicited to give scope to the activities; the meetings of many of the societies were devoted to discussions of various aspects of the playground movement; the newspapers were kept filled with articles, comments, accounts of what other places were doing, notes on the local activities; and, finally, the whole was capped with an exhibit when the playground was closed. This exhibit was witnessed by many people, but particularly by the children, who were by then as active as any of their parents in support of the movement.

When the special town meeting was held in the fall the people were interested. The attendance was so heavy that the voting list had to be used to check off those who came and admit only voters. When business was started every seat was taken. There were other articles ahead, but by a vote of the meeting the playground question was taken up first, and the extensive report of the special committee was read throughout.

This report was an interesting civic document. It called attention to the probable growth of the town, to its peculiar formation, the centers of its present and probable development, the needs of its people, and particularly to the fact that large areas of marsh land had been purchased at low figures to be held till the town would lay sewers, construct streets and develop values. It was pointed out that the planning of the marsh lands by private owners was poorly done, that the lots were small, the houses already built poor, and that here was a chance for a development of which the town could ever be proud.

Then came the recommendation that $75,000 be appropriated to buy a large area of this marsh land for playground purposes. There was but little discussion, and the motion was unanimously carried. By this action Winthrop puts herself among the enviable towns of the country.^[20]

Ethel Moore, president of the Board of Playground Directors of Oakland, California, has the following to say regarding playgrounds in California:

The first playground in California was opened as an experiment in 1898 by the women of the California Club under the leadership of Mrs. Lovell White. The experiment proved a success, and in a few years the same women educated the public to the point of carrying a bond issue of $741,000 and of amending the city’s charter to provide for the appointment of a playground committee.

Again the women of a city took the initiative, under the able generalship of Mrs. Willoughby Rodman and Miss Bessie D. Stoddard and in 1905 Los Angeles organized its own supervised, all-the-year-round playground, the beginning of a model recreation system.

In Oakland, due largely to the inspiration of Mrs. John Cushing, the women of the Oakland Club opened a vacation playground in a school yard as early as 1899. When, nine years later, the Playground Commission was created by municipal ordinance, it was appropriate that two members of the club that had faithfully provided for the children season after season, Mrs. G. W. Bunnell and Mrs. Cora E. Jones, should be appointed commissioners by Mayor Mott.

In 1911 Oakland adopted a charter embodying the commission form of government. The Playground Department then fell under a Board of Directors (consisting of five members, “not more than three of whom shall be of the same sex”) similar to the boards that control the Public Library, Park Department and School Department.

With the growth of these municipal systems there grew up a state-wide interest in public recreation. Courses for play-leaders were offered at the State University, and under the auspices of the San Francisco Branch of the Association of Collegiate AlumnÆ, the Playground Association of California was organized in 1909. The first annual meeting of the Association took the form of a three days’ Conference of Playground Workers, the success of the gathering being due largely to the efforts of Mrs. E. L. Baldwin and Mrs. May Cheney, of the Committee.

And now each year sees marked advances in both rural and city communities; larger appropriation, new sites, better trained and better paid supervision, increased attendance, more intensive work, greater coÖperation with other agencies, wider usefulness in promoting the opening of school buildings as well as in developing park properties—thus providing recreation for adults as well as for children.^[21]

In a note to Miss Moore’s report, the editors of The American City add:

Western cities have been the first to make the control of public recreation a distinct branch of municipal government. Every California municipality of 8,000 inhabitants and over has a playground or will have one within the next year or two; all the large cities have special playground commissions provided for by their charters. Oakland may well be proud of her playgrounds. We understand that the city has now spent about half a million dollars for this purpose, and has 10 playgrounds, 5 in parks and 5 in school yards. The remodeled Moss residence, one of the finest remaining specimens of old California architecture, is to become a municipal country clubhouse, the only one of its kind in the West.

Other reports state that Seattle has already spent more than $500,000 for playgrounds, and has purchased twenty sites, twelve of which have been improved and equipped and are now under supervision. The city has three up-to-date recreational field houses and a large municipal bathing beach. Tacoma’s fine school stadium is well-known. Everett and Bellingham are two other cities of the Northwest that are expending much money and attention upon playgrounds.

Far to the South, as well as the West, we hear of woman’s work. The Civic Club (women’s) of Charleston, South Carolina, started twenty years ago a vacation playground and the need of this institution was so well demonstrated that the City Council finally purchased and established in that city the first playground in South Carolina. Five women were appointed on the Playground Commission.

It would be impossible to make even the barest mention of the women who have promoted the playground movement. Mrs. Caroline B. Alexander has mothered it in New Jersey, especially in Hoboken, a small densely populated industrial city; Lillian Wald is secretary of the Parks and Playground Association of New York which welcomed last summer about 300,000 children to the opening exercises of its summer amusement centers; a Playground Commission in Richmond, Virginia, is made up of delegates from the City Council and the Congress of Mothers; in Denver the executive body includes representatives of the school board, of the playground commission, and of the Congress of Mothers. Miss Julia Schoenfeld, field secretary of the National Playgrounds Association, is one of the most inspiring of the women in this movement and she stimulates activity in this direction throughout the country. A list given in its year book of the officers of recreation commissions and associations shows almost equal responsibility assumed by men and women for the offices of president and secretary of the same.

Having established playgrounds, women seek to maintain some supervision over them. They are advocating the use of playgrounds as evening social centers. They are asking for medical inspection and corrective exercises in the playgrounds. They are asking for experimentation in teaching in the playgrounds. They are inculcating ideas of good government among the children.

Inasmuch as in great cities like New York and Chicago there never can be enough playgrounds on the street level to meet the needs of the children, there is a decided movement in such municipalities toward the transformation of roofs into playgrounds. The Parks and Playgrounds Association of New York, directed by both men and women, has already opened several of these roof playgrounds and the influence is being felt in various constructive ways. Private owners of apartment houses are beginning to supply these facilities for young tenants as an inducement to mothers to rent homes with them. Schemes for aerial playgrounds over the streets on platforms are being proposed also.

Another very practical scheme for playgrounds is the provision of certain streets for play, traffic being shut off from them during definite hours of the day. A systematic plan is being made of New York by the present administration to ascertain to what degree this scheme can be extended and in this work two lines of interest, in which women are very active, converge: recreation and safety. Frances Perkins and other women have stimulated interest in public safety to a marked degree in New York.

Since the love of dancing persists without abatement through the centuries, dancing must be accepted as a human need. Dancing should not, however, cause the ruin of young men and women. That would seem to be a trite remark but it has apparently taken infinite pains in investigatory and publicity work to persuade the public or any considerable portion of it that unregulated modern dance halls do injure their patrons and that they must be reformed.

The trail out from the home, when followed by women in urban centers, has led them in almost every case to the dance hall. Health workers, W. C. T. U. women, welfare workers, social workers, educators, propagandists of all kinds have found in the public dance hall their Waterloo. The number of policewomen in the cities now assigned to these places to safeguard young girls is a direct response to the demands made by women that such municipal provision be made for their care.

Both men and women have been needed in the investigation of dance halls and both have responded to the need, comparing notes and conferring on the general situation. The men can better gain the confidence of the male patrons, follow them to their resorts and learn whether the dance hall is allied with vicious interests. On the other hand, the women can better gain the confidence of their own sex and find out what motives actuate girl patrons in frequenting such places, in drinking the liquor that is almost invariably to be found at dance halls, and in succumbing to the temptations that are offered at the close of the dance. Among the skillful and ingenious women investigators of dance halls, Julia Schoenfeld, now field secretary of the National Playgrounds Association, perhaps takes first rank. Her study of conditions in New York City, which she made under the most difficult requirements, paved the way for the municipalization or municipal control of the dance halls which has become an accomplished fact, if on a small scale at present.

Mrs. Charles Israels of New York and the members of the Women’s Municipal League, with the facts obtained by Miss Schoenfeld, were able to start a substantial movement toward the extension of municipal functions in New York to cover the recreation of dancing, not entirely, of course, but to the extent of providing greater facilities for this recreation under careful supervision and with drinking entirely eliminated. One hears women in New York state as their hope that before long their city will boast a municipal dancing master who will preserve for the foreign colonies, that exist in such, abundance, their old-country folk dancing, who will have facilities for providing inspiring music and halls where the young may dance with safety and freedom. In spite of good beginnings in this direction, however, New York has been slow to follow the excellent example set by Chicago with its system of field houses for dancing in the public parks.

The evil resulting from the commercialization of the dance hall can be destroyed only by eliminating the element of profit-making. Municipalization is the remedy. Well-informed women are now arguing this. Mrs. Louise de Koven Bowen, head of the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, is one of the women who are educating the public to a realization of the fact that profit-making from dancing must be abolished. In a little pamphlet entitled “Our Most Popular Recreation Controlled by the Liquor Interests,” she presents a study of the public dance halls of Chicago which is most convincing in its plea for a department of recreation in Chicago.

In York, Pennsylvania, the Woman’s Club, in coÖperation with the Associated Charities and Mr. Francis H. McLean, compiled an ordinance now in effect, putting dance halls under city control. Other clubs and organizations of women have done the same and scarcely a convention of women anywhere at any time fails to go on record as in favor of similar measures of control.

In many places, the women are not waiting on the tardy action of city councils, but are instituting safeguarded dancing places of their own. “Sunday dances for young people is an innovation by the Women’s Outdoor Club of San Francisco. Club women will supervise the affair. The reply to criticism about encouraging Sunday dancing is that young people will dance anyway on their only free day, and it is better to provide them with proper surroundings than leave them to the temptations of the average dance hall.”^[22] It is significant that the Department of Education of the Civic Club of Allegheny County was the one to institute dances on Sunday evenings for young people over sixteen years of age. Bringing the question of amusement home to Bridgeport, Connecticut, Mrs. Upham, industrial secretary of the Y. W. C. A., said that a petition circulated in the city had brought in 600 signatures of working girls demanding dance halls where no liquor should be sold and where they might enjoy themselves in safety.

Simultaneously with the movement for the regulation of the public dance halls is the movement to establish girls’ dance clubs, non-sectarian and open to girls in employment, largely in order to wean them away from the public dance hall. Mrs. Charles Oppenheim of New York is a promoter of this movement, which she hopes to make one of national proportions. It is in a way the direct antithesis of the movement toward municipalization of recreation, and grows out of the success that private individuals and organizations have met with in making girls so interested in their own clubs that they prefer them to the public dance. The two movements are not necessarily antagonistic, however, as they allow a freedom of choice and insure wider provision for the needs of the young.

Clubs offer the follow-up work that is necessary after the dance. The club and the dance are sometimes combined, but serious class work can often be secured by the relaxation afforded by the weekly dance. Clubs conducted by women for young people and for adults are very often serious educational features in the guise of pleasure, and the results that have already been felt, as well as the realization that far more can be achieved if attempted on a big social scale, a municipal scale, if possible, have led to the movement for the opening of schools as social centers. In Manchester, New Hampshire, the club women organized and support a Boys’ Club. They look after more than 100 young boys who sell papers and black shoes and the like. The boys are taught trades and the clubhouse affords them recreation and protection. No effort is spared to arouse the ideal of good citizenship and the boys respond nobly. The Woman’s Club at Green Bay, Wisconsin, remodeled a building for a center for working women and transformed it into a recreational and educational center. The Woodlawn Woman’s Club of Chicago established an organization for housemaids which is a social center. Such centers for domestic workers have been founded in several cities and the reports on waywardness among domestic workers indicate that their neglect in any scheme of recreation is serious indeed. They are a large factor in the patronage of public dance halls and any public control that reaches the hall reaches the domestic worker.

For children too old for the playground and too young for the dance the club is a vital institution. No type of club has appealed to the hearts of men and women more than the Newsboys’ Club and work with these little waifs has led on to an interest in the regulation of street trades for children, mothers’ pensions, and other reform measures.

Music as an element of recreation has been emphasized by women everywhere as a public necessity. The Westchester Club at Mt. Vernon, New York, holds each season a series of high-class educational concerts for the public and these have proved very popular. This Club is composed of nearly 400 women. It built and thoroughly equipped a large auditorium seating 800 people, with smaller halls for recreational uses, greatly needed in that city.

The women and men of Denver have made municipal concerts a striking feature of their city. These concerts are held indoors in winter as well as out-of-doors in summer and are of a very high grade.

San Antonio, Texas, is fast developing into a musical center for the Southwest, owing to the activity of the San Antonio Musical Club of which Mrs. B. F. Nicholson is president, and the Tuesday Musical Club of which Mrs. Eli Hertzberg is president. Besides bringing to San Antonio some of the best artists that appear in New York and Chicago, San Antonio is also treated to a good concert every Saturday morning, free to the public, and given by the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra.

Austin, Texas, is apparently inspired to follow the example of San Antonio. The MatinÉe Musical Club, of which Mrs. Eugene Haynie is president, the oldest musical club there, and the Austin Musical Festival Association, of which Mrs. Robert G. Crosby is president, are the leaders in this movement. They are working with others for a municipally owned auditorium in Austin as there is no satisfactory place at present where concerts can be given.

The objects of the Music Festival Association are declared to be the improvement of its members and the development of musical taste among the people through the presentation of productions by the greatest artists. The president and members serve the community without stint and with no thought of personal gain. Owing to the relative indifference of the business community thus far they are obliged to assume considerable financial responsibility. This organization is especially interested in the school children, and a chorus which the children were permitted to sing to the accompaniment of the Damrosch orchestra a year or so ago was highly praised by Mr. Damrosch. It is hoped that a similar thing may be done when some leading orchestra shall be secured for concerts next spring. This feature was omitted when during the present month of May the St. Louis Symphony orchestra gave a concert. This organization, with its several soloists, was booked at a date too late to give time for chorus practice. Here it may be remarked that the musical instruction and training in the public schools, given under the supervision of Miss Katherine Murrie, is considered a large factor in the artistic growth of the community.

In Indianapolis, Mrs. Ona Talbot is given credit for having transformed that city into the musical center which it is now. It has been largely owing to her interest that the very best of music has been brought to the well-to-do people, at least, of Indianapolis: the Metropolitan and Boston Grand Opera companies; the Boston, New York and Chicago symphony orchestras; the Russian Ballet; opera singers and instrumentalists.

The Civic Music Association of Chicago, first suggested by Mrs. George B. Carpenter, was recently launched according to plans made by the Woman’s Club of Chicago. “Music within the reach of all” is its slogan. Mrs. Carpenter is president and she has the coÖperation of the Chamber of Commerce and prominent women like Ella Flagg Young. Dora Allen, of the Association, states the aims in an article in The Survey:

It is hoped that local committees may be organized at recreation centers to coÖperate, that neighborhood choral and orchestral clubs may be formed, that opportunity may be given for lecture recitals, initial appearances of young artists, production of works of resident composers and all distinctly American music, and that annual musical festivals may be held, to bring together the local groups. It is further planned to extend the work from the playgrounds to the halls in public school buildings, twenty-five of which are now open as social centers.

We cannot think but with a great deal of concern and with some humiliation of the effect which America has on some of the best capacities of the foreigners who come to us. They come singing folk-songs, national songs, and snatches from their operas. We drown these beautiful melodies with the tawdry rags and popular songs of the saloon, the dance hall and cheap theater.

That is a dark picture. A bright one was vividly painted to the writer by Mrs. Edward McDowell, who is devoting herself to the interests which aroused her great husband’s greatest enthusiasm: the development and democratization of music in America. The remarkable success of the Peterboro pageant is well-known throughout the country, and yet as Mrs. McDowell pointed out, the people who worked so hard and who so artistically rendered the music and dances and dramatic action were the townsfolk and laborers of a small New England village. With the achievement of this pageant in mind, Mrs. McDowell after a visit to the Chicago playgrounds in the immigrant districts was enthusiastic over what might be done with the coÖperation of the Bohemians, Germans, Scandinavians, Italians and Poles and other art-loving nationalities.

In almost all towns and cities there are free public libraries. In a growing number there are institutes in which painting and sculpture are exhibited without charge; and do we not see, here and there, the beginnings of a movement to present good music, either without charge or at a cost so small as to place it within the reach of all?

In this development of the passion for good music through coÖperation among the people, we are just beginning to recognize the needs of the negroes who, by poverty or the sharp color line, have been excluded from the proper encouragement of their own talents and tastes. The Music School Settlement for Colored People in New York City is becoming the nucleus of a recreation center for colored people in which the dramatic and musical instincts of the race will be developed in an interesting and creditable way. But it is not alone in the effect it has on the colored people that the Settlement may be said to have demonstrated its usefulness; it has also been the means of interesting an increasing number of white people in the needs and aspirations of the colored. It is only by mutual understanding and sympathy that the negro question can be solved. The Music School Settlement for Colored People is trying in its own way to help in the solution of this grave social problem. The officers of the Settlement include men and women, and women have been generous contributors to the support of its work.

As the moving-picture “show” creeps into every crossroads village and multiplies in the cities, it becomes the people’s theater. In proportion as a theater is educational or demoralizing in its influence, the “movie” becomes the people’s school. What lessons do the people learn there or is the influence of the movie negative?

“What kind of motion pictures do you like best and why?” was put recently to more than 2,000 school children in the grammar grades of Providence, Rhode Island. Mrs. Dwight K. Bartlett, who conducted this investigation for the Rhode Island Congress of Mothers, classified the replies as follows:

The influence exercised by certain pictures is exemplified by some of the answers Mrs. Bartlett received.

A sixth-grade child said, “A child that goes in and sees exciting pictures comes out excited and starts playing what we saw and becomes wild.”

“Western pictures sometimes make youths go out West to become cowboys and run away from home.”

“I like where men has a wife and three children and the wife has a fellow.”

“I like where the husbun’s go an play pool and then when there money is gone they go home and take their wife jewels and leave them and never come back again.”

“If a person goes to a show he goes to laugh and not to cry, for he has so many troubles at his home.”

“I like love-making picture best. It is exciting when two men want to marry the same girl.”^[23]

A study of moving pictures has been made in other cities by women, and all over the country they are giving serious attention to the problem of securing the exhibition of high grade films only. Upon the suggestion of club women, the Board of Education of Parsons, Kansas, has undertaken to give two free moving-picture exhibits each month to the school children. The films are selected by the superintendent of schools assisted by the manager of the theaters and the subjects are confined to history, geography and science.

The Mayor of Wichita, Kansas, has asked the club women to appoint a board of three members to serve without pay as censors of moving-picture shows, inspectors of theaters, reading rooms and street cars. Suggestions for correction of evils will be received and acted upon by the Mayor. The board is to be permanent.^[24]

In Pittsburg, Kansas, the club women are working out a censorship plan for moving-picture shows, which is proving successful. Mayor Graves appointed a commission of women, headed by Mrs. Harvey Grandle, president of the Pittsburg Federation of Clubs, which confers with the managers of all five- and ten-cent vaudeville and moving-picture shows. A most cordial spirit of coÖperation is reported upon the part of these managers, in eliminating all films depicting scenes of crime, drinking scenes, and suggestive “love scenes.” If all mayors would appoint similar commissions, whose work would be as successful, it would not be long before the manufacturers of moving-picture films would take the hint, and cease to put out films of the tabooed classes. Wichita is working out a similar plan through a commission, and this seems the most practical plan. A commission, being clothed with authority, is received with courtesy and acting in coÖperative not antagonistic spirit, receives the assistance of the managers. Local federations or clubs should make it a point to bring this work before their city council or city commission.^[24]

The American Club Woman declares that “women’s clubs are wisely deciding to coÖperate with the film companies to make them a good influence upon the millions of young people who patronize them. The censorship plan is proving successful in many cities. Volunteer boards of club women who serve without a salary, find that it is not difficult to secure the rejection of pictures which create a bad impression. Some tact is useful in persuading the managers of moving-picture shows to use the right kind of films. Censorship is rather a formidable term, but is robbed of many of its terrors to managers, when they find that the approval of the censors means increased business for clean shows.”

The women do not always agree, however, as to the kind of film that should be shown. New York last winter witnessed a quarrel among women and also among men as to whether white slave films should be exhibited or prohibited. “Do they suggest or do they warn?” is the issue that must be settled by the stronger combatants, for this is destined to be an issue of increasing insistence.

That the municipality cannot be oblivious to the fact that its restrictive measures may increase evils elsewhere, is shown by Mrs. Bowen, of Chicago, who says in a report:

There should be a state or national censorship committee for motion pictures. The motion pictures of Chicago are very well censored, and something like one hundred and twenty-six miles of films have been condemned and permission to exhibit them refused. In consequence, they have been sent outside the city, all over the state, and many of the pictures exhibited in the small towns are bad—the rest of the state suffering for the virtues of Chicago! A state law should be enacted providing that all moving pictures should be shown in well-lighted halls, and the posters and advertisements outside all theaters and throughout the city should be censored and passed upon by the same committee which censors the moving pictures.

Women play a large part in the work of the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures established by the People’s Institute of New York. In addition to the members of the Censoring Committee which includes many women, the National Board has some 300 correspondents in different parts of the country who are more or less officially identified with it and who work with women’s clubs, civic and social organizations, in addition to mayors, license bureaus, and others. The work of the national association is, therefore, fairly equally distributed between men and women.

It is not the pictures themselves that are necessarily the worst feature of the motion-picture theater, as the Board brings out and as social workers generally emphasize. The lack of ventilation, the fire hazard, the lack of protection for boys and girls are evils comparable with indecent films. On all those aspects of the problem of the people’s theater, groups of earnest men and women are working, securing ordinances, acting as inspectors and policewomen, and seeking to educate the patrons to demand decencies.

The standard for censorship set up by the Board is thus stated: “Broad problems, such as the effect of scenes of violence on the juvenile mind, still rest in an astonishing obscurity. It is impossible to get either from the lips of psychologists or from the penal statistics of the country, any conclusive verdict on this subject. In the same way, it is hard to distinguish between the immediate effect of a vulgar picture on the audience, which may be presumed to be degrading, and the ultimate effect which may, through reaction, be that of exciting the audience to a permanent disgust with vulgarity in all forms. In matters of this kind, the Board acts on the general assumption of all its members, which are general assumptions of people at large.”

The National Board does not and cannot relieve any community of its local responsibility. As “the motion-picture theater is essentially a form of public service which is licensed by the community for public welfare, the same kind of scrutiny should be applied to it that is applied to any public service monopoly, news-stand privilege or park concession.”

A compilation of material from all parts of the country as to existing laws and the methods used in regulating motion-picture theaters in America and Europe has been made by the National Board and these form a partial basis for general facts and principles set forth in a Model Ordinance devised by it with detailed suggestions applicable in all the cities of the country. This work of securing adequate legislation is often taken up locally by women’s clubs. For example, the Wisconsin Federation of Women’s Clubs vigorously supported a bill in the legislature, providing for a censorship of moving-picture films throughout the state.

Charlotte Rumbold is the intermediary between the National Board of Censorship of Picture Films and the St. Louis Police Court. A volunteer committee of which she was chairman made the St. Louis inspection of picture shows and dance halls. Officers of the Good Citizenship Club of Boise, Idaho, a women’s association, act as an advisory committee with the Law Enforcement League and Ministerial Association in censoring movies.

Private enterprise joins with public-spirited women in securing model motion-picture shows. In Boston, Josephine Clement is the manager of the Bijou Dream Motion Picture Theater and has had five years’ experience in providing the public with a model theater. Plans for similar theaters are afoot in two cities. Mrs. Clement declares from her experience that they are self-supporting and a great deal more satisfactory to the owner than those which invite constant interference.

Motion-picture films are really receiving more attention than the plays and comic operas and vaudeville shows which are supported by people who care less for the movies. Thus the percentage of innocuous films probably is lower or is becoming lower than the percentage of innocuous plays in other theaters.