Plans for carrying on the work toward international peace by the Carnegie Endowment in Europe, Inc., became known yesterday when Justice Guy of the New York Supreme Court approved an application for the incorporation of that organization. Among the objects to be attained by the corporation are: To advance the cause of peace among nations, to hasten the abolition of international war, and to encourage and promote peaceful settlement of international differences. In particular to promote a thorough and scientific investigation and study of the causes of war and of the practical methods to prevent and avoid it. To diffuse information and to educate public opinion regarding the causes, nature and effect of war, and means for its prevention and avoidance. To cultivate friendly feelings between the inhabitants of the different countries and to increase the knowledge and understanding of each other by the several nations, etc.
Praiseworthily lofty and noble as the projects outlined above may be, it is no disparagement of their promoters to assert that there is nothing startlingly new in the design they have at heart. In all generations there have been altruists who envisaged a world freed from war, but always has it happened that they have been aroused from dreams by the thunder of the guns. From one point of view at least, the saddest of countless sad sights in Europe after August 2, 1914, was the Peace Palace at the Hague.
But if there is nothing especially novel in what we may call the Carnegie creed as above worded, there is this to be said for the peace promoters of to-day that they have one great advantage over all their predecessors, even over those of ten years ago. A new medium for preventing Man from repeating his former errors and crimes is, by leaps and bounds, reaching a marvellous state of development. There is every reason to believe that the message above referred to, which a blood-stained race sorely needs, is that which the Carnegie Foundation is desirous of bringing to the minds and souls of men. But have the powers of evil and unrest, the promoters of international jealousies and hatreds, selfish demagogues craving always more power that they may make the worse appear the better reason, out-generaled the forces of righteousness and placed the screen in bondage to their pernicious designs? If they have, and the Esperanto of the Eye is to speak for Mr. Hyde instead of Dr. Jekyll, then has another great calamity befallen a race that had no need of more.
CHAPTER XVI
THE MOVIE AND THE CENSOR
The Movie Ran Wild for Years—Not Threatened with Censorship Until too Old to Need it—What Christ Thought of Pharisees—History and Common-Sense Against Censorship—Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis Denounces it—Tories vs. Freemen, Yesterday and To-Day—American Constitution Doomed if Censorship Prevails.
CHAPTER XVI
THE MOVIE AND THE CENSOR
We Americans are forever boasting of our sense of humor, but we have a deplorable way of exhibiting a complete lack thereof at certain crises when its saving grace alone could rescue us from ludicrous inconsistency. When in the early life of the movie it most needed supervision and restraint it was allowed to run wild at its own free will, and at once became a naughty, mischievous boy, covered with mud. As it grew in years and achievement, developing gradually new and higher ideals, its need for parental discipline automatically decreased, and it exhibited internally those guiding, corrective powers that have made it constantly more worthy of the sympathy and support of the best element in our civilization. And then came to pass a manifestation of belated Pharisaism upon the part of certain narrow-minded influences in our community that would have been laughable had it not been fraught with serious consequences to a novel art-form struggling to find its appointed place in the life of the world. Where was America’s boasted sense of humor when the demand for movie censorship waxed loud—for minorities always make a great noise—long after any reasonable excuse for such a censorship, if such excuse there could be, had forever passed away? What would be said of a father who had allowed his son to indulge in every kind of youthful indiscretion until the latter had almost reached his majority and then, when the boy had shown signs of repentance, reform, regeneration, confined him forcibly to his room and fed him physically upon bread and water and mentally upon the old Blue Laws of Connecticut? Neither the heart nor the brain of such a father would appear to us as sound.