The Influence of Songs and Pictures
By Editor
A good while ago some one said that if you would allow him to furnish the songs to be sung by the people and the pictures to be hung on their walls he would risk what they would become. No one can deny the truth that lies in his assertion. Current songs that are sung by the people and the pictures that they are viewing every day have a powerfully molding influence on their lives. And not only do song and picture mold the life, but they also show much concerning popular sentiment. For instance, if there were not at the present time a popular sentiment to support it, you would not find cartoonists in all the leading papers of the land making caricatures on the home life; you would not find them making jest of decency, as if it were not serious for a man to be deceiving his wife and flirting, to put it mildly, with other women on the sly. There is much current popular song that is of the same order. These songs and cartoons say to the young man and the young woman whose characters are just forming, that there is nothing serious about the virtues that lie at the foundation of decency and the family life; the impression is created that there is something smart about the whole evil course of vice. And the same papers that publish such demoralizing cartoons, and that will give space for these demoralizing songs in their "great magazine sections" on Sunday, will at the same time decry through their editorial columns the vices and the grafting of the "white slave" traffic, etc., etc. It is just as if a man were sowing broadcast the seeds of every form of noxious weeds, and then were cursing the weeds because they grew from his planting. Society, through its widely circulated publications, can not cultivate impurity and still remain pure. The president of the great woolen trust has been indicted for the charge of placing dynamite about the mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in order to prejudice the people against the strikers during the labor troubles there in the recent past. The gentleman makes light of the idea of being guilty. But whether he is the one that did the deed or not, it is true that some one is guilty; and what a dastardly thing it is for an individual to place explosives where innocent people by the scores are likely to be killed and crippled, and all in order that some personal end may be gained! When such things are talked about, the tendency is to enter into a discussion as to who is guilty in the matter. But it is time for men to begin to think more in regard to what such things really show of the actual conditions in society, and how every indication points to something great and decisive to take place, and that at no very distant day. Conditions as they are to-day can not be prolonged for a great length of time.