ust be such as to leave a tendency toward good and not
toward evil, if children and youth are safely to receive its strong
impressions. This is understood by those who are "trying to elevate
the moving picture," but too often the reformers and the educators are
so far removed from the main sources of control of any business or art
centre that they only brush the outskirts of the agencies that purvey
to public amusement and fail to reach any citadel of real control.
There is a general uneasiness, however, among many people of all
classes, even those usually very easy-going about any social
influence, as they read the tales of children testifying in the courts
as to their "hold-ups" and their burglaries that they did them "like
the movies" they had seen. It is surely true that the next thing we
must do is to tame these "movies" and make them work in social harness
for the better, and not the worse, in the lives of children and youth.
What line of cleavage may be drawn between what the elders may see and
what should not be allowed so vividly to impress the younger minds, no
one can predict. The recent public announcement of a determination to
cleanse and uplift the moving picture business from within its own
management is a most hopeful sign. But surely no parent can throw all
the blame of any evil influence of a film exhibit upon the managers of
a theatre! Where are the parents, and what are they about, that they
do not know what pictures their children see and how often they go to
any place of amusement?

=The Automobile and Its Influence.=--The same thing is true of the
automobile, that now so often takes the youth of the well-to-do
classes too swiftly away from necessary social safeguarding. The
inventors and makers of these machines are not responsible that
criminals use them for unprecedented escape from arrest, and boys and
girls go to destruction of honor and purity in a whirl of wind and
dust. As in all the new inventions and discoveries, we have gained
more control over material things than we have yet learned how to use
for either our physical or moral good. We shall sober down, no doubt,
and learn to wholly profit by the new wonders of motion and of
recreation.

=Parents Need Social Help in Moral Training of Children.=--Meanwhile,
the parents who are trying to make the right atmosphere and secure the
right influences for their children have a more difficult task than in
any previous time; for the young can so