disgusted over the situation, said recently:

"It is almost inconceivable that neither State should have interested itself in making sure that its rights would be protected. No contract or conditions were made with either State. Nobody paid any attention to the project.

"For myself, I believe either State could now enjoin the trespass on its property and the interference with its waters, and prevent the operation of the plant. It is exactly what ought to be done, and I have taken steps to call the

power interests to pay any attention to them. Congress blithely gave away-or was assumed to give away-the water and river-beds belonging to the States, and the States didn't know or care enough about their rights to interfere.

A great number of such grants have been made by Congress, on just as lax conditions, with just as much disregard for the interest of the States and the people. Recently, public attention having been focused on the value and possibilities of water power and the tendency to monopoly, the States have been taking

notice. They want protection. Congress, however, having long been in the habit of giving away what the States owned, is not disposed to relinquish that pleasant privilege. It stands on its right to control navigation, as sufficient to justify all the rest. The courts have left a wide realm of uncertainty about exact division of powers and interests; and there matters stand.

Because nobody else was trying to protect public interests, the Federal authorities have lately been trying to stretch their authority to cover these cases. Roosevelt vetoed some dam bills because they contained no provisions for protecting the public interests. He wrote and spoke and did everything possible to command attention to the situation. Among the measures he vetoed was one providing for the construction of a dam. on the James River, in southwestern Missouri; and the story of that veto is also the story of the methods by which the power exploiters too often get what they want despite opposition.

After the bill was vetoed, an effort was made to pass it over the veto; but the necessary two-thirds of votes could not be mustered in the house. The bill was dead.

Two or three years later the very same proposition, disguised so that it could hardly be recognized, bobbed up again. Taft was president. A new corporate name had been hitched to the applicant. This time an association of local people wanted the power; just a modest, innocent little local enterprise; a perfect outrage for Congress to interfere with them!

To be sure! So Congress granted the power. The dam has been built; and today it is owned by a subordinate of the General Electric. It is just a modest little cog in the great machine that grinds out dividends for the General Electric, favorite little sister to the Money Trust!

One of the most active water power getters in Congress has been Senator Winthrop Murray Crane of Massachusetts. He has been about the most enthusiastic introducer of bills with this end in view. Referring to a bunch of Crane bills, in one of his water power vetoes,

Roosevelt bitingly observed that "these bills either were drafted by representatives of the power companies, or are similar in effect to those thus drafted."

And he was nearer right than, perhaps, he himself knew; for Senator Crane is one of the biggest individual stockholders in the General Electric Company and was for years on its board!

The effort to get water powers and other federal wealth of the public domain turned over to the States, for the purpose of easier access by the exploiters, is being pushed right now with more vigor than ever before. Secretary of the Interior Fisher and Secretary of War Stimson, both of whom have authority over water powers, have worked together in the effort to protect the public interest, and with considerable success. They have induced the power companies on the upper Missouri in Montana, and on the Connecticut River in Connecticut, to accept grants under terms which contain rigid restrictions against over-capitalization, imitations on earnings, public right to fix rates for power, etc. But the fight is being pushed all along the line; and nowhere with so much zest as by the water power trust. It proposes to get all it can from the Nation, and when it can get no more, to have the public domain turned over to the States and then get the rest from them.

The democratic doctrine of State sovereignty affords a dangerous reason for supporting a program of cession to the States. Likewise it apparently justifies the leaving out of restrictions upon power grants. States rights democrats insist that, as the water and river-beds belong to the States, Congress has no power to impose conditions upon their use, that is for the States to look after. But if the States neglect to do it—as in the case of Illinois, Iowa and the Keokuk dam-what becomes of the poor public?

Between this view of doctrinaire advocates of State sovereignty, on one side, and the activities of such as Smoot, Austin, Crane, Olmstead and their kind, the water power trust is marching right on toward the complete control of National industry. Only quick action will block its success.

Ꮤ

E sat in the dark, chilly dress circle of a New York theater one morning, a dozen of us, including a master mechanic, a few vaudeville actors, and three or four men of the press, waiting for the first stage. rehearsal of a kinetophone play. This and others of the wonderful new talking picture pieces had been tried out at the Edison laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, and had been pronounced by Mr. Edison as "a little raw." Some of the Some of the rawness had been ascribed to the size of the room and its acoustic defects.

"It will be all right when we get it in a big theater," the wizard had promised. So it was now in a big theater and here was the first stage trial of it.

Well, you may be sure that the thrill of anticipation was prickling our nerves and that we little minded the chill of the great empty auditorium.

"All right, Jim!" called Chief Engineer

M. R. Hutchinson of the Edison works, to the man away up in the little lantern loft; "let her go!"

The machine began to sputter and the light to flicker fitfully, after a fashion painful to weak eyes, on the white curtain above the middle of the stage. We knew that the show was about to begin.

Forth upon the screen in front of us strode Brutus and Cassius, eyeing each other with looks of scorn. The two old Romans paused. Cassius bent his manly brow and made a stately gesture. Then his lips parted and moved and out of his mouth came in clear, distinct bass tones, these words:

"That you have wronged me doth appear in this :

You have condemned and noted Lucius Pella

Of taking bribes here of the Sardians, Wherein, my letters, praying on his side, Because I knew the man, were slighted off."

To the thrill of anticipation succeeded the thrill of surprised delight. Surprised? Yes; because not only was here the vivid, swaying, gesturing picture of a man talk

ing, but he was talking in the even, natural, albeit somewhat stilted, tones of that familiar Cassius whom I had seen strutting the boards in this very scene time and again in years of play-going. In other words, though I had expected realism, I had not expected any such realism as this. And this novel feeling of amused satisfaction over a "movie" show deepened as the dialogue ran on and Brutus, with looks and shrugs of deprecation and austere disdain, declaimed:

"You wronged yourself to write in such a

of sound and motion that created the almost perfect illusion:

"Brutus, bay not me. I'll not endure it: you forget yourself, To hedge me in; I am a soldier, I, Older in practice, abler than yourself To make conditions."

While they talked and their voices rang through the empty auditorium, the two tragedians changed places that stage tradition might be conserved, and then Brutus moved his pictured lips to exclaim:

"You say you are a better soldier:

Let it appear so; make your vaunting true."

The voice that replied fitted the facial movement and gesture perfectly: "I said an elder soldier, not a better: Did I say better?"

And so the ancient quarrel ran on, the two Romans swinging their hands as their speeches became more passionate, while their voices rang out boldly so that they could easily have been heard in the top gallery. As their lip movements slowed, the tones slowed with them. I am quite sure that the keenest lip-reader would not have detected any lack of synchronism between the labial and the

THE EDISON STUDIOS IN NEW YORK CITY, WHERE KINETOPHONE RECORDS ARE MADE.

enunciatory performance. The illusion was complete. In fact it was the kind of illusion that makes one forget its existence. It was far better than the work of any ventriloquist I ever have heard. One accepted the effect without thought of how it was produced. Only during the brief pauses did it occur to the auditor that a concealed talking machine was at work behind the screen as a component part of a complete mechanism that concurrently produced the moving imagery, the play of the lips and the resounding vocables.

That mechanism was the kinetophone upon which Edison had been working for four years but which was now perfected. This talking-picture idea, so vainly striven with by other inventors, is based upon two comparatively old machinesthe motion picture machine and the phonograph, but up to within a month of the time when I witnessed this first stage rehearsal, the two never had been harnessed so as to work together in perfect harmony. Clever people had had actors talk into recording machines and then

THOMAS A. EDISON. INVENTOR OF THE REMARKABLE NEW MACHINE, THE KINETOPHONE.

play the piece separately, but the illusion held good only in spots, the whole making what was really a farcical performance.

I had been out at the Edison studios in the Bronx the day before the rehearsal and had seen the actors and mechanics make ready for the kinetophone play of "Faust." One scene was that in the infernal regions, and before it the recorder and the camera, with its reel of film, were placed, but the synchronizer, the most important part of the invention, I was not permitted to see. This synchronizer times the acting and talking, just as a metronome times a musical perform