p. 314 | MOVING PICTURE SHOWS by G. B. T.

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 26, 1914

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 41, No. 20.

MOVING PICTURE SHOWS

By G. B. T.

What They Are Doing to the Youth

The evil and degenerating tendency of the moving picture show is occasioning alarm to thoughtful minds everywhere. The scenes of vice and crime are daily pictured before the minds of tens of thousands of both old and young. A Mrs. Barclay Hazard, head of the New York branch of the National Florence Crittenden Mission for unfortunate women, writing in the Outlook, says:

"Let us take, for example, the analogous case of films showing hold-ups, railway wrecks, cowboy fights, etc., the heroes of which are occasionally led even to the electric chair. But their final destination does not in the smallest degree discourage their would-be imitators among the boys of the community. Hardly a week passes that some enterprising boys are not arrested as runaways, having started out to capture and annihilate the wild Indians with the somewhat inadequate equipment of two dollars and forty cents and a rusty revolver. Did their activities end there, the amusing interest might be the one most obvious; but these same children have been known to tie younger and weaker comrades to the stake and light bonfires, which have so injured the victims that several deaths are the record of this species of entertainment."

"Now, these boys are not necessarily either foolish and simple, as shown by the rusty revolver; nor are they inherently bloodthirsty and wicked, as might be indicated by the fire and stake. They are simply normal adventurous boys on whose minds the films made no impression except such as they chose to have made upon them. The human mind, even at a very early period of life, is intensely selective. There is much psychology in the Bible text, 'What went ye forth to see?' For what we go forth to see is what we do see; and what impression we take from pictures, from plays, from books, and even from music, is the impression that we choose to take."

The seeds of crime, vice, human depravity, and various phases of the social evil are thus sown in the minds of the young, the harvest of which, when brought to full fruition, will tend to ruin many souls. And this is only one of the numberless means by which evil is sown, the harvest of which will stagger the world.