WE Americans are forever boasting of our sense of humor, but we have a deplorable way of exhibiting a complete lack thereof at certain crises when its saving grace alone could rescue us from ludicrous inconsistency. When in the early life of the movie it most needed supervision and restraint it was allowed to run wild at its own free will, and at once became a naughty, mischievous boy, covered with mud. As it grew in years and achievement, developing gradually new and higher ideals, its need for parental discipline automatically decreased, and it exhibited internally those guiding, corrective powers that have made it constantly more worthy of the sympathy and support of the best element in our civilization. And then came to pass a manifestation of belated Pharisaism upon the part of certain narrow-minded influences in our community that would have been laughable had it not been fraught with serious consequences to a novel art-form struggling to find its appointed place in the life of the world. Where was America’s boasted sense of humor when the demand for movie censorship waxed loud—for minorities always make a great noise—long after any reasonable excuse for such a censorship, if such excuse there could be, had forever passed away? What would be said of a father who had allowed his son to indulge in every kind of youthful indiscretion until the latter had almost reached his majority and then, when the boy had shown signs of repentance, reform, regeneration, confined him forcibly to his room and fed him physically upon bread and water and mentally upon the old Blue Laws of Connecticut? Neither the heart nor the brain of such a father would appear to us as sound. In the eleventh chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke, Christ is quoted in ringing, uncompromising denunciation of that reactionary, tyrannical exercise of usurped authority which, through varied methods and media, has checked the progress of the human spirit toward enlightened freedom throughout all the centuries: Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not aware of them. And again he cries: Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers.... Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.