The public is curiously indifferent to the lack of genuineness of sentiment; “hocum” and bathos; deliberate and obvious counterfeits of emotional reactions characterize practically every appeal to the general public. Think of the popularity of a play like “Abie’s Irish Rose,” or of that, a generation ago, of a song like “After the Ball,” or of a book like “The Man Nobody Knows.” Think of the typical Chautauqua lecture or political address. Think of the notorious insincerity of the motion pictures. People ask, “What is the matter with the movies?” The answer is, the audience. Half-educated people do not seem to be sensitive to the difference either between good and bad workmanship or between artistic sincerity and insincerity. Standards of value, in all the older forms of art, have been set by the knowing ones. The artist was obliged to submit his creation to the criticism of persons who had some background of tradition and general knowledge. With the quantity production methods of the motion pictures, it becomes possible for the first time to make the man on the street the critic, on whose judgment depends survival, and as the New Testament says, “By what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.” In selecting our preferences we pass judgment on ourselves. The multitude dupes itself with its desire to get something for nothing; hence its love of the miraculous. All appeals to it are thus over-capitalized, and made to appear grand and glorious. Shirking the effort necessary for real achievement leads to the preference of quackery. There is a story that a physician who had yielded to the temptation to make easy money by advertising himself as the discoverer of a magic remedy for disease, received a call from a former friend and colleague who disapproved of the practice. When the visitor sought to persuade him that such methods would not pay, the other stepped to the window and said, “Come now, look with me at the faces of the people passing along the street; how many of them do you think would become your patients and how many mine?” I am told by a professor of biology who gives a pre-medical course in a Western university that less than a third of the cases of sickness in the country are treated by reputable members of the medical profession.