In the past many wage-earners found an anodyne for the monotony of their lives in beer and football! a few in religion, spending their spare time in the service of some little mission hall where the adult male, if he is a member, is almost alw a worker also; few had ud some read.
In the past if a workman has spent his leisure time in reading and the books have not beea technical in character, it has been safe to assume that he was a dissatisfied man. The contrast between his mode of life and that of any life depicted in fiction, travel or biography sets up in his iniad such invidious comparisons that if through lack of ability he is unable to rise individually, he will turn to the nearest revolutionary, socialist tic, syndicalist or bolshevik that promises a chance of his class rising collectively.
In the past these men were rare exceptions. The average man, having no inducements such as literature provides, to spur him on to demand for a fuller and more cultured life, was passably content with the squalor in which he lived. So the isolated and rare reader, turner revolutionary, could shout himself hoarse in appeals to his apathetic "brothers" to throw of their "chains." They remained indifferent to any vision of better things retailed secondhand by their self-appointed mentor, especially they knew that he had got it from that despised source, a printed book.
Lives axp Taetes.
To-day the "pictures" have chauf ged all that, they are the stimulant to imagination, envy and desire, which up till now the wage-earner has lacked, and they present the comparison to him more vividly than any book could do.
Should you pass in an industrial district one of these "palaces" just as they disgorge their patrons into the streets, the outrush of stale and fetid air' will appel you. The multitude emerging are in their grimy working—clothes—nobody troubles to "dress" for the pictures (the interior is mercifully dark) so the air is redolent with the musty smell of old clothes and unwashed bodies. A fleeting glimpse of the grimy interior will disgust you, both with the palace and the patrons, but the same disgust which affects you is also by a slow and subtle alchemy beginning to affect the drowsy audience as well. The very nature of the entertainment cannot help doing this. In a socood the real picture of their condition, which they at last begin to realize, is switched off, and they are on the sun-soaked plains of California lives of luxury, wealth and ease are unrolled before them, beauty and adventure, moonlit sexs, romance—life.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.