camps may be pitched, a privilege free to all, the only requirement being that campers notify the caretakers of their plans and that they observe the rules which are similar to those in force in our National parks. Topographical maps of the forests enable visitors to select just the type of forest they are seeking. At the same time a complete index to animal life and wild-flower growth is available. By a simple reference one can establish the exact character of each one of the more than 18,000 acres at present constituting the forest preserves. In the same way the course of streams and the location of lakes, both of which abound in the district, is made clear.

A specimen of the existing Chicago preserves is found in 1,200 acres of hilly woodland in the so-called Deer Grove tract, twenty-six miles northwest of Chicago. Here are native groves of shagbark hickory which are said to be unsurpassed in the United States, old Indian trails still following their immemorial courses, a small herd of deer roaming over 850 acres, a flock of five hundred sheep, running streams and lakes of clear water in which fishermen find their zeal rewarded and to which the blue heron and bittern resort. Wild ducks come in abundance. Quail and pheasants are a common sight. Song birds abound. The variety of shrubs and wild flowers is extraordinary. For the special accommodation of poor children there is an admirable camp equipment at one end of the preserve. There are bunk houses, a cook house and a dining-room, an ice house, an athletic field, and boating facilities adequate for the demands of four or five hundred

THERE IS ROOM FOR THE FISHERMAN IN CHICAGO'S FOREST RESERVES boys and girls. There is also an emergency hospital.

Among the plans for the future are an arboretum, designed to be the greatest in the world and which will include every species of tree and shrub that can. be grown in the latitude, and a zoological garden which will be unique among similar institutions of the world. The latter feature has been made possible through the gift of a 300-acre site by Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick. The zoo, as planned, will give the impression of all sorts of wild animals roaming at

will in their natural surroundings, for cages, bars, and chains will be replaced by more modern methods of restraint, or will be so cleverly camouflaged that the animals will seem unhindered. The zoo itself will be divided into five sections, with a ridge skirting all the exhibits, so that a panoramic view of every animal is offered to the spectators as they enter the garden. The five divisions will be tiered, with the last one, holding mountain lions, mountain goats, and similar animals, towering mountainlike as a background.

E

VER since the formation of this Republic Congress has been experimenting with the tariff, and we are little nearer a correct solution of the matter now than at any time in our history. It seems almost an absurdity that a country like ours should after a hundred and thirty-odd years of National existence be without a fixed policy with respect to taxation of its imports. The reason for this is to be found in the fact that tariff issues have become SO thoroughly mixed with politics that they are incapable of being unscrambled. It is almost a foregone conclusion that when one meets a Republican one finds a more or less ardent protectionist-a protectionist not of necessity because he believes in protection, but because the Republican party stands for protection and that is enough. Much the same may be said

of the average Democrat. Democratic free-trade principles are to him as his religion. But touch the pocketbook of either good and hard with tariff legislation which interferes with his personal business, even though it conforms with the principles for which he stands, and see how quickly he will wake up. He will go to almost any length in order to protect himself against legislation inimical to his business interests. But, having succeeded, or having failed, it matters little, he will be found right back where he was before-stanchly advocating the tenets of his political faith. A conspicuous example may be cited in the following:

The writer happened to be in New Orleans during and after the first election of Mr. Wilson in 1912. Of course the Crescent City and the country thereabouts rooted and voted solidly in the

way it had always rooted and voted, and their candidate was elected. He won on a platform, among other things, of an immediate downward revision of the tariff, and everybody knew it. Everybody knew, too, that a lowered tariff on sugar, one of Louisiana's chief products, would open the doors of our markets to Cuba and other West Indian islands, where sugar could be produced cheaper than we could make it. In the enthusiasm of the political campaign this fact seemed lost sight of. Louisiana was Democratic, and must remain steadfast to its principles though the heavens fall-and they did. But it was almost amusing to see the altered feeling which prevailed in that section with the passage of the Underwood Tariff Act, which became a law within the minimum of time after the new Administration went into office in the follow

ing spring. The bars were let down to Cuban sugar, and gloom prevailed till the Louisiana lobby at Washington succeeded in having some of the sting taken out of the Tariff Bill, which enabled the sugar planters to live. But did this alter the political complexion of the State or a belief in the tariff principles for which the Democratic party stands? Look at the returns for 1916.

We know in advance to a certainty that a change in Federal Administration will mean a new tariff, and, almost automatically, the two parties line up for or against tariff measures according to historic beliefs. The manifest absurdity of the thing lies in the fact that the tariff is a business and not a political proposition-that tariffs should be raised or lowered as business conditions demand, rather than because there is a different Administration in power. Time was when the ranks of the Republican party contained a majority of those whose personal interests lay in protection, but the business of production and manufacture is now so evenly distributed among the adherents of both factions that party lines, so far as the tariff is concerned, no longer cut much of a figure.

The tariff has always been a political issue in this country, as one readily sees from reading our history. During almost every Democratic Administration there has been a low tariff, and a high tariff when Republicans, or their predecessor Whigs, were in control. One may search in vain, however, for evidence that business conditions differed, back and forth, so sharply as to make tariff revisions necessary at the time of the change in Administration.

In view of the peculiar situation in which the United States finds itself today with respect to both its domestic and international relations that have come about as a result of the war, there is a large and increasing number of business men of both political faiths who, if they were to express an honest opinion, would say that the best interests of this country lie in reduced rather than in advanced tariffs. These same men, however, know that an upward revision is due from this Administration and that nothing short of a popular uprising-something like that which shortened the life of the "Tariff of Abominations" in 1828-can stop it. Notwithstanding this belief, inwardly held although not publicly expressed, all sorts and conditions of men, Democrats and Republicans, from East, South, North, and West, are in Washington, each with his little high-tariff or low-tariff ax to grind. Camouflage argument as much as they please with economic theory, with proof conclusive that a high tariff is the only kind of legislation which will save the country from going to the well-populated "bowwows," or that low tariff will do the me thing, the basis of their plea is nterest. It is an age-old controStripped of all question of ad

vantage or disadvantage which might accrue to this or that community, group, or class of business by reason of high or low tariff, the economic question involved is, Will the country prosper the most by the protection of home industry to the exclusion of materials and manufactures of other lands, or will it not? The question is as broad as the ocean and has many ramifications.

True to its traditional principles, the Republican Administration has written its Fordney tariff of the House, which is now in the hands of the Senate Finance Committee, where it is likely to undergo many revisions, for it is far from being a popular measure. In principle it forgets that in the eight years since the writing of the Underwood tariff world conditions have completely changed. It does not take into account that if we are to sell to Europe we must also buy, nor of the fact that if Europe is ever going to pay the money it owes the United States it must pay in goods. The Fordney Bill is not popular with the party responsible for its being even with its high protective provisions, and many manufacturers are asking that the Fordney tariff schedules be doubled.

Protectionists have often quoted a saying attributed to President Lincoln. When asked to express his views on the tariff, Mr. Lincoln is reported to have said: "I do not know much about the tariff, but I do know this much: when we buy goods abroad, we get the goods and the foreigner gets the money; when we buy goods made at home, we get both the goods and the money." This argument seems to have sunk deeply into the American mind. Taussig, one of the foremost tariff authorities of the country, contends that Mr. Lincoln, being a man of superior intellect, never could have made a statement so faulty in economic argument. The error of the alleged quotation is that foreign goods are paid for in money, when every one knows, or should know, that it is goods exported which pay for goods imported, and that, except in a most limited way, money never changes hands. It is the application of the mistaken principle contained in Mr. Lincoln's alleged quotation that has misled so many people into thinking that by throttling imports through high tariffs "money" is kept at home and home industries and home markets made to prosper.

There are a great many people who think that the present is no time to tinker with the tariff; that it would be far the wiser plan to wait till we and the rest of the world have settled down to a more nearly normal basis, when the needs of ourselves and other nations could better be understood. There are a great many people who think that if the tariff is to be changed at all the best interests of the country will be served by a tariff which will permit of a reasonable competition from abroad. They are not alarmed by the cry of the protectionist that American factories and American workmen will be idle and that calamity will ensue if the bars are

let down to the foreigner. They know that it is self-interest which prompts such views, and decline to be frightened.

It is true that we are more nearly economically independent than any other world Power, and the greatest market for our products is in our own country. "Still, true as this is," says Mr. John McHugh, of the Mechanics and Metals Bank of New York, "we cannot now, if we would, withdraw our interests from other countries, except at terrible cost, to ourselves, and at more than terrible cost to them."

Nobody wants to see free trade in the United States. The idea is almost unthinkable. No country has an absolute free trade, and the tendency in all European countries is now towards higher protection. Even England, which has always been held up by free-traders as a conspicuous example of their theory, never was without import duties in a moderate form, which even she is now revising in an upward direction. But the position of England and other European countries differs sharply from that of the United States. The same conditions which make for an upward movement in their tariffs make for a downward movement in ours at this particular time, when our country is under so heavy a moral obligation to our neighbors across the sea and they under so heavy a money obligation to us.

There is now a Tariff Board in Washington composed of two Democrats, one Progressive, and three Republicans. It is said to be non-partisan, but it might be as partisan as you please and it would make but little difference, as it has no power-it cannot even recommend legislation. Its duties are merely to collect data for use by the Congressional committees having tariff legislation in charge. It is claimed by many that this is a useless commission, in that it has no sources for obtaining information not open to the Ways and Means Committee of the House and the Finance Committee of the Senate. In the past there have been other tariff boards and commissions, also without power, and they have passed into the discard-a fate which will sooner or later overtake the present Board unless the recommendation of the President that it be clothed with a measure of administrative power be complied with.

The people who go to Washington and appear before the Congressional committees are people with axes to grind. Were this not so, they wouldn't be there. The people with no axes to grind, and whose only interest in high tariffs or low tariffs is that prompted by the general weal, do not go. There isn't the incentive for their going. The seekers for special favors at the hands of Congress know as well as another what is right, but if what is right interferes with their pocketbooks they will range themselves solidly for its protection and are capable of advancing all kinds of arguments to bolster up their contentions.

Since it appears to be impossible to keep polities out of the tariff as matters

I

N the Wisconsin town of six thousand where I live the moving-picture theater is like a hundred others that I know, from New York to the Ozark Mountains. From its arched white-and-gold entrance a flood of amber light streams across the pavement. The girl ticket-seller stands in a domed Oriental booth, chopping twenty-two cent admission tickets from a little machine. Tri-colored posters in violent drawing advertise the nightly change of bill. And, no matter what the evening's offering may be, into the theater and out of it surges the crowd. The whole town, all sorts of people, flock to the theater as an established habit.

Our townspeople form but part of the regular audience. Just before the first show in the evening, if you happen to be driving in the country, you may look in all directions and see lines of automobile lights speeding along the roads toward a common focus. They are heading for the movies. If it be Friday or Saturday night, the street outside the theater and the adjacent side streets will be parked thickly with the farmers' Fords. Not even the dances which are going on in at least two halls, so near that the jazz music carries plainly to the Majestic's ticket window, can keep the country boys and girls away from the show.

Last summer I revisited a mountain valley in southeast Missouri after an absence of four years. It is twelve miles to the county seat, and the trip over a boulder-strewn road in a mountain wagon jolts for two hours. When I hived there formerly, it took an annual Baptist Assembly or an unbearable toothache to bring the average woman to the point of herding her flock of children into the wagon and accompanying

TITLE-PAGE FROM CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE'S "DR. FAUSTUS"

her husband to town. Since the movies came to the mountains times have changed. Last summer I looked about the dusty hall where the pictures are shown. The people from my valley were there, and it was evident that they were accustomed theater-goers. Whether the movies are wholly responsible for this latter miracle I cannot say, but I do know that no mountain man is going to labor at road-building when the road leads only to markets and the dentist.

It is like this all over the United States. In the history of the English theater there has been but one other

audience of equal significance. That was in the days of the Elizabethans in London. There was such an audience then, motley, enthusiastic, regularly attending. It packed the playhouses from the beginning of the history of the commercial theater, years before good plays were offered by the managers and before there was one talented professional playwright. The apparent enthusiasm of the Elizabethan crowd for cheap melodramas, low comedies, and plays with unclean dialogue and situation worried the literary critics and the social reformers of that time just as our mania for the movies worries many thoughtful people to-day. That sixteenth-century mob of English show-lovers, however, proved to have a force which called their own playwrights into being, and so created what is now referred to as the golden age of English drama. Even a faint chance that the American moving-picture audience may have a similar force seems to me to give meaning and excitement to a comparison.

In 1586 or 1587, when an unknown young man named Shakespeare came to London from his home village to see what the city had to offer him, the English theater, in any modern sense of the word, was only a few years older than the movies are at the present time. The first modern English comedy, "Ralph Roister Doister," written by a teacher for a school performance, had appeared in 1551. Since then London had been going theater-mad. Our first movingpicture shows were put on by the Edison Vitascope Company in 1896, since when we have been going movie-mad.

In the early days of the craze sixteenth-century Londoners crowded to inn yards, where the plays were given cheaply, very much as we in 1905 packed

neighborhood store buildings and airdromes, paying our nickel to sit on kitchen chairs before a stretched cotton sheet and watch the first flickering versions of the Bill Hart school of drama. By the time Shakespeare came to Len don Richard Burbage, the manager "ron. whom he secured work as an actor, had built a playhouse, and rival managers had followed suit. For an infant industry the theatrical business was booming. It had its buildings, managers, companies of actors, and a considerable number of actor-playwrights who were willing to turn out cheap thrillers as fast as the managers would pay for them. Most important of all, it had the whole of London for an audience crowd. Everybody went to the theater except Queen Elizabeth and some Puritans, and the Queen had the companies act their plays for her at Court. You will remember that Mr. Wilson had frequent showings of the movies at the White House during his recent illness, when he could not go to a theater.

For thirty-five years after its start the English theater was just about as far committed to commercialism as is our moving-picture theater. And you will keep in mind, please, that the movies are only twenty-five years old. The Elizabethan managers and their financial backers-noblemen who liked a good show themselves and found it more advantageous to help maintain a fairly good company playing in a public theater than to keep a private troupe of lower-grade actors-were out to make as much money and popularity as possible by entertaining the crowd. Murders and kidnappings, scenes in insane wards and houses of prostitution, exciting stories of high society, violent love. making and raw comedy. were sure to do the trick. And so the managers and their rather ignorant staff of young ac

tors and play-carpenters naturally took the easiest way. Just as ours do.

Only a few of the plays produced in the commercial theater before 1587 were published. Fewer still are available to modern readers. Yet we can form some idea of the stuff they were, both from the plays which immediately followed them and from the criticism of literary men and social reformers of the period. Scenes set in Spain were popular with young Elizabethans much as ranch scenes are with young Yankees, and for the same reason; that was a land where one wert, or dreamed of going, to get adventure. Another type of play had a rich Jew for a hero-villain: the Jews represented big business to the sixteenthcentury imagination. The play-goer had a chance to see these captains of commerce in their counting-rooms, handling convincing-looking heaps of gold and rubies and talking importantly of argosies and customs duties. Another favorite character with the crowd was the courtesan or, in a slightly modified makeup, the fashionable woman of light character.

Notorious murders of the day were immediately turned into sensational ballads, printed, and sold on the streets: these ballads were dramatized, yellow details included, while the horror still quivered in the mind of London. Recent events, especially the lives of popular contemporary heroes, such as Sir Thomas More, were used as material for crude historical plays. Our method in the twentieth century in the movies is to engage the defendants in criminal trials and such National figures as Mr. J. Dempsey to present their cases or triumphs in person.

Much of the dialogue, and even of the plot, in an early Elizabethan play was impromptu. The actors had a general idea of the plot outline of the play to be

presented, and at the performance made up speeches and action as they went along. I have read that successful moving pictures are produced in as spontaneous a fashion, a director with a megaphone calling necessary information about the plot to he players, who quickly mold facial and bodily expression to suit the story.

None of this is calculated to satisfy a highbrow. The literary critics in Elizabeth's reign thought the theater hopeless. Books and pamphlets were published to show that it was pandering to the worst level of public taste. The playwrights and actors were condemned as immature and ignorant. Roger Ascham, critic of repute who had been tutor to Elizabeth, complained because English playwrights were not following Greek and Roman models. The only English dramatist approved by Ascham was one Mr. Watson, of Johns College, Cambridge, who wrote a tragedy, "Absalon," but was so ashamed of using anapests instead of iambics in a few places that he would never permit the drama to be produced and gave up trying to write for the theater. Even Sir Philip Sydney, so generous in his appreciations, could foresee little from the vulgar drama of his time and condemned the "naughty playmakers and stagekeepers."

The social reformers, among whom. strangely enough from our modern point of view, can be counted the London City Council, declared with cause that the people of England, "specially youthes." were being harmed morally by "inordinant haunting of great multitudes to plays."

"Look but upon the common playes in London," cried a Puritan preacher named Wilcocks in an anti-stage sermon at Paul's Cross, London, in 1577. "See the multitude that flocketh to them and

followeth them: behold the sumptuous theatre houses, a continual monument of London's prodigality and folly."

Another clergyman, John Stockwood, complained from the same pulpit, presumably to a small congregation, "Wyll not a fylthe play wyth the blast of a trumpette sooner call thither a thousande than an houres tolling of a Bell bring to the Sermon a hundred?"

Boys and girls picked up dangerous acquaintances at the theater, its opponents stated with truth. There were ugly stories around London of young girls, daughters of good citizens, who had fallen into bad company through their habit of play-going and after that had followed evil ways. Echoes from some of these reports even got into the proceedings of the City Council. Censorship was tightened; plays, players, and theater buildings all had to have licenses, and these could be revoked at the discretion of the city officials. Players giving "naughty playes" were arrested. By city ordinance all performances had to be given by day, so the audience could reach home before sunset. The theaters were always closed in time of epidemic.

At such times as the doors were open, however, the people poured in. They were easily pleased and not at all delicate in matters of taste. They preferred jokes and sex appeal unexpurgated. Yet at bottom, with regard to things which they felt to be essential, they were effectively critical. Art they did not consider an essential, for the good reason that they knew nothing whatever about it. What they held out for was an ethical point: that their drama should make a clear distinction between the basic elements of right and wrong as seen by Englishmen. At a time when Italian and French fiction writers of the

Renaissance were glorifying trickery and sensual cruelty English writers and audiences, even in plays which seem to us coarse and violent to the point of madness, were giving their admiration to kindness, faithfulness, and independence.

Such an audience 'creates a demand which creates playwrights. Within five years from the time Shakespeare came to London, forty years from the start of the modern English commercial theater, that demand had created Christopher

Marlowe, Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd, and George Peele. Five years more, and it had created Shakespeare.

At that rate of time progress, probably the swiftest that the dramatic world has ever seen, the movies would have until 1936 to produce their first scenario writers of significance and until 1941 to launch a fully representative genius.

Whether we shall have a golden age in the movies depends, I believe, upon. the existence of certain character elements in the American audience. It does not depend upon any feeling or lack of feeling which we may have shown in the past for other forms of art. We have the necessary initial passion for this one dramatic form. It happens to delight us as a Nation, and such popular delight is like the sun-without its warmth no drama can grow ripe and golden. In addition to the sun, theatrical art, like other growing things, requires soil. In the case of the movies, the elements of the soil are those which make up the essential character of our National audience.

What qualities will be developed in American scenario writers by our enthusiasm or checked by popular disapproval? Have we a strain of sentimentality which will prevent us from growing truthful playwrights? What about our present insistence upon a "happy ending"? Have we sturdiness with which to resist attempts at handing out economic or political propaganda, sugarcoated with drama?

It is too early for the productive force of the American audience to be determined, but upon it depends the future of the movies as well as its influence upon our own and coming generations.