=The Motion Pictures.= The motion-picture business has become one of the greatest enterprises of our day. In 1914 there were over 20,000 motion-picture theaters in the United States. The year before that three hundred million dollars was spent for films, and over five billion paid admissions were recorded throughout the country. The motion-picture has made possible the reproduction of the best plays, and they are offered to the people at a very low price. Five and ten cents will permit any one to be amused for a whole evening. The motion-picture theater possesses great educational possibilities. It has revolutionized our ideas of entertainment. The best books have been put into films and more people than ever before are having a chance to read. This is having a profound effect upon our lives, for as has been said, “the thing we see impresses us more than what we hear.” We often say, “it went in one ear and out the other” but no one ever says, “it went in one eye and out the other.” The making of films requires the work of thousands of actors; besides carpenters, masons, machine operators, directors, and managers. It is a huge business! A crowd gathered in New York at Thirty-fourth Street and Second Avenue one Saturday afternoon. A man was beating a boy when a disheveled woman ran out from the side entrance of a saloon and threw herself upon this beast. He grasped her by the throat and was just about to strangle her, when the boy, released from the clutches of the man, stabbed him in the back with a knife and thus freed his mother. It happened so quickly that many of the crowd thought that they were looking upon a real tragedy. It proved to be simply a “movie” being enacted upon the street. In a Florida city an automobile dashed into town; a young girl was in the back seat, while in the front was a young man driving the machine with one hand and holding a preacher down with the other. They stopped in front of a church; went inside, and there they were met by two other men, accomplices of the young fellow, and who stood one on either side of the minister with revolvers at his head and forced him to perform the marriage ceremony. An outrage in real life, but really played for the movies.