foundation. An eminent alienist of Chicago states that he has had a
number of patients among neurotic children whose emotional natures
have been so over-wrought by the crude appeal to which they had been
so constantly subjected in the theaters, that they have become victims
of hallucination and mental disorder. The statement of this physician
may be the first note of alarm which will awaken the city to its duty
in regard to the theater, so that it shall at least be made safe and
sane for the city child whose senses are already so abnormally
developed.

This testimony of a physician that the conditions are actually
pathological, may at last induce us to bestir ourselves in regard to
procuring a more wholesome form of public recreation. Many efforts in
social amelioration have been undertaken only after such exposures; in
the meantime, while the occasional child is driven distraught, a
hundred children permanently injure their eyes watching the moving
films, and hundreds more seriously model their conduct upon the
standards set before them on this mimic stage.

Three boys, aged nine, eleven and thirteen years, who had recently
seen depicted the adventures of frontier life including the holding up
of a stage coach and the lassoing of the driver, spent weeks planning
to lasso, murder, and rob a neighborhood milkman, who started on his
route at four o'clock in the morning. They made their headquarters in
a barn and saved enough money to buy a revolver, adopting as their
watchword the phrase "Dead Men Tell no Tales." One spring morning the
conspirators, with their faces covered with black cloth, lay "in
ambush" for the milkman. Fortunately for him, as the lariat was thrown
the horse shied, and, although the shot was appropriately fired, the
milkman's life was saved. Such a direct influence of the theater is by