place in the newspaper office, I read exchanges for some months. The list covered the world of newspapers in English. There I told Lanigan of the Akhoond of Swat, who had come to the World office in a single A. P. "flash," and there too in the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette I read the City of Dreadful Night, which swept me with seething memory of an August night in Mosul. The English of the newspapers on that exchange list in all the homes of our brotherhood of the imposing stone, was careless and promiscuous but it never merits the other accusation. The newspaper has done world wide work in leadership by keeping us all reading and therefore speaking the same English.

If Samuel Johnson had had his way we should have become like the "Doktoren" of the German leader writers, men who write in a literary tongue. The greatest of them does not. Wilkes and Junius, particularly Junius, misled us for awhile. Even over here, until Hale made over the American editorial in the Boston Advertiser, we were wandering in a desert of polyglottic dignity.

One, Benjamin Franklin, saved us. He and Johnson lived parallel lives. Johnson was born three years later and he died six years earlier than Franklin. Both wrote early and they wrote to the last. Each turned to the periodical. They knew men, letters and affairs. On opposing sides, they fought the issues and the battle of our RevoIution. Johnson died just as Franklin signed the treaty of peace and of independence. In the lists of public opinion, the style of Franklin was pitted against the style of Johnson. He was the inventor of newspaper English, direct, immediate, knowing humor as well as argument, using the speech of the people. The literary world in England and here accepted the style of Johnson; the world of men and of events the style of Franklin.

The world is unconsciously ruled by it today. We all walk in Franklin's path for ill or well. Samuel Johnson is a back number. His resonance, his even and easy flow, his antithetic sentence, his sense of the past, his vast vision of the long march of European tongues from the stylus to the printing press, these are gone. He is with the other Pharaohs of the captivity and isolation of literature. Franklin was not altogether alone. Defoe was before him. Cobbett came after. But more than any other one man, Franklin, the newspaper man, saved us from a sepa

ration and divorce of the English of the people and the English of the writer. The temptation was to make the prose of the eighteenth century a standard. Instead, the current of the talk of the many and the diction of the writer merged. The new words and phrases, the changes in the details of speech, slang and the imagery of our American speech, all these, through the newspapers, found their way into print and acceptance in the American newspaper. The "column" is a sort of bedding-bench where the new phrases and words of the hour are set out as the gardener beds and pots young plants before they go to live in the garden-beds with an older bloom. The sporting-page diffuses the argot of the hour in every athletic field. What use a genius like O. Henry made of all this in what we all admit is literature; but how few of us, alumni of a morning daily now gone, saw this when our Washington despatches and city reports jostled his work in the New York Sun.

If any one desires to know how slang should be and can be introduced to better company study O. Henry. He uses it for atmosphere and flavor and does not make it the warp and woof of his fabric as the baseball reporter does too often. Even in this difficult and cryptic field how easily does a master-hand like Mr. Grantland Rice of the New York Tribune combine the picturesque technique of the bleachers with dignity, precision and strokes of illuminating humor worthy any field. Charles A. Dana had no hesitation in the use by his staff of any two-fisted phrase of the streets so it did its work. He himself was keenly awake to every change in a living tongue like English and no style could be purer and more impeccable than his, born of study of an amazing capacity for language, a scholar in that practical philology which aids a man to use his own tongue the better and more effectively.

The daily risk of newspapers and the individual newspaper is that it will have an editorial dialect of its own, that reporting will become reportese, that criticism will be nothing more than shaking a kaleidoscope of adjectives. usually laudatory and that each department will obscure its message to the average man by using terms known on Wall street, in trade, in the court-room or "sports" and "theatrical" columns but fully understood nowhere else. The one sure and only way to avoid this and instead to keep newspaper English a living link between the letters of the

past and the speech of the present, is to know both, to live in great letters as well as to live by the last news. Unless this be done, newspaper English will become but a dialect and newspaper readers be separated from the diction of the past. If any young writer ask how best to do this, let him, not only live with the great, but train his sense of words by freely using the Concordance of Shakespeare, the Bible, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning and Wordsworth. These are the true guide and dictionary of the writer in the use and meaning of words.

The office of newspaper English is to be the interpreter of the ways and works of all men and all women to each and all. For this, it needs to draw freely from all sources and to share the beatitude of Isaiah, "Blessed are ye who sow beside all waters." Nothing is too recent in slang for its columns, and nothing too old in classic letters.

Occasions there are and subjects, or weighty or solemn or both, which every trained newspaper man knows call for the English of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of the loftiest prose. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has but three words not in the Bible, "continent," "proposition" and "civil," and these are all in Shakespeare. This is the diction in which a man should soak himself, if he wishes to have weight with those who read. He will know then when wisely to add the word of the hour.

Taken as a whole the newspaper was never better writ ten and never did its work better in any of its fields. If you doubt this, read the files! They will dispel the myth of a past when all wrote well on some daily; but the highest success of newspaper English and the most important office and duty has been discharged in keeping the great march of English abreast and preventing a great tongue from being divided into a language of the past for letters and a language of the present for common and daily use, neither sharing the life of the other.

TALCOTT WILLIAMS.

THE CENSOR AND THE MOVIE

"MENACE"

BY ELLIS PAXSON OBERHOLTZER

IN my contribution to the NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW'S recent discussion on the "Menace of the Movies," I have no wish to examine the reasons for the fascinating hold of the moving picture upon the public, but it is my intention. instead to explain the quarrel of the people, or that part of the people who have a responsible social sense, with the moving picture on moral grounds.

That there exists a deep seated feeling unfavorable to the film, unless it shall first have passed through the hands of competent officers, who shall inspect it, to see what it contains, is undoubted. The declarations of large numbers of secular organizations dedicated to the cause of social betterment, as well as many religious and semi-religious bodies are proofs that the manufacturer who, for his profit, will pander to the people's lowest tastes, will not for very long go forward uncontrolled. The rules which T. P. O'Connor enforces as the Film Censor of Great Britain; those which must be heeded in Quebec, Ontario and all the provinces. of Canada, in Australia and in Japan; in Pennsylvania, Chicago and several other States and cities in this country, are founded upon a conviction that there are common public rights which must be guarded as this great new industry proceeds on its victorious course. The fact that there were bills proposing boards of review before the legislatures of some twenty-five or thirty States last year, and that these proposals will reappear in the same legislatures next year, and thereafter, if necessary, until they are enacted into law, further confirms the observant man, whether he be in or out of the industry, in the knowledge that in the belief of those who, guided by a conscientious purpose, usually cause their views to prevail in the end, there is a "menace" which calls for community action at once.

The nature of the picture man's offense is not difficult to state by one who has gained a familiarity with the whole film output, as it comes to the projection rooms of a board of review like that in Pennsylvania, for, let us say, five years, as I have done, seeing and considering it each day with the aid of my colleagues and assistants to the extent of from 12,000,000 to 20,000,000 feet annually. The experienced British Board of Film Censors has classified its objections under a variety of heads. Omitting those which are dictated by considerations of public policy due to the war, they are seen by reference to a recent report to include the following:

Indecorous, ambiguous and irreverent titles and sub-titles.
Cruelty to animals.

The irreverent treatment of sacred subjects.

Drunken scenes carried to excess.

The modus operandi of criminals.

Cruelty to young infants and excessive cruelty and torture to adults,

especially to women.

The exhibition of profuse bleeding.

Nude figures.

Offensive vulgarity and impropriety in conduct and dress.

Indecorous dancing.

Excessively passionate love scenes.

Gruesome murders and strangulation scenes.

Executions.

The effects of vitriol throwing.

The drug habit, e.g. opium, morphia, cocaine, etc.

Subjects dealing with the white slave traffic.

Scenes depicting the effect of venereal diseases, inherited or acquired.

Themes and references relative to race suicide."
Materialization of the conventional figure of Christ.

Turning to Pennsylvania, which has taken a leading position in this department of community service in this country, it is plain that its rules reflect the same standards of moral feeling and are aimed at the correction of the same evils. It could not be otherwise for the material under review comes from the same source. It appears that more than 90 per cent of all the film shown in Great Britain originates in the United States. Last year we exported to that and other foreign countries enough cinema ribbon to girdle the earth twice at the Equator. The law in

1 Report of British Cinema Commission of Inquiry, pp. xxxi and 15 on the testimony of Mr. O'Connor.