ientious he seems to have been at least a candid objector.

* * * * *

"THE BIRTH OF A FLUENCE."

In consequence of the new tax on imported films the Cinema industry in
England has received a new fillip, and a wave of enterprise is passing
over the studios. In place of the familiar--almost too familiar--
American dramas we are to have English. No more of those square-jawed
stern American business men at their desks, with the telephone ever in
their hands and instantaneous replies to every call. No more police
officers, also at their desks, giving orders like lightning and having
them understood and acted upon as quickly. No more crooks clambering
over the roofs of an express train. No more motor-car pursuits. No more
Indians, no more cowboys, no more heroines in top boots.

And what is there to be instead? Not--I hear you cry appealingly--not
panoramas of Zurich or Cape Town? No, not those devastating views of
scenery, but home-made films "featuring" English performers, with an eye
not only to entertainment but instruction. That is the new movie note.
And for a start a wonderful picture has just been completed, under the
title "The Birth of a Fluence," taking the Cinema-goers (as they are
called) behind the scenes of a London daily paper.

Not a real paper, of course, for that would be telling too much, but an
absolutely imaginary paper, yet like enough in many respects to a real
paper to afford to the imaginative spectator an idea of how such
marvellous sheets are put together.

No expense has been spared to get an air of verisimilitude into these
pictures, at a private view of which we were permitted to be present.

Let us give a rough sketch of the film, which is some mile and a half
long, or as far, say, as from the House of Lords to Printing House
Square. But first we must remark that the unseen force which agitates
all the documents and blinds of the various rooms shown is not due, as
it usually is, to the circumstance that the pictures were taken in the
open air, during a gale, but it symbolises the power of the Proprietor
of the paper, who can by a breath make or unmake Governments.

The first picture shows the arrival of the Editor, a man of desperate
mien, dark as a thunder cloud, ready to be affrighted by nothing, with
instant disapproval of whatever he disapproves breaking through his
alert, intellectual features. To him, stern patriot as he is, it is
nothing that men d