In this development of the passion for good music through coöperation among the people, we are just beginning to recognize the needs of the negroes who, by poverty or the sharp color line, have been excluded from the proper encouragement of their own talents and tastes. The Music School Settlement for Colored People in New York City is becoming the nucleus of a recreation center for colored people in which the dramatic and musical instincts of the race will be developed in an interesting and creditable way. But it is not alone in the effect it has on the colored people that the Settlement may be said to have demonstrated its usefulness; it has also been the means of interesting an increasing number of white people in the needs and aspirations of the colored. It is only by mutual understanding and sympathy that the negro question can be solved. The Music School Settlement for Colored People is trying in its own way to help in the solution of this grave social problem. The officers of the Settlement include men and women, and women have been generous contributors to the support of its work. MOTION PICTURES As the moving-picture “show” creeps into every crossroads village and multiplies in the cities, it becomes the people’s theater. In proportion as a theater is educational or demoralizing in its influence, the “movie” becomes the people’s school. What lessons do the people learn there or is the influence of the movie negative? “What kind of motion pictures do you like best and why?” was put recently to more than 2,000 school children in the grammar grades of Providence, Rhode Island. Mrs. Dwight K. Bartlett, who conducted this investigation for the Rhode Island Congress of Mothers, classified the replies as follows: Grade 5 6 7 8 Totals. Comedy 85 90 99 100 374 Western or cowboy 192 211 186 146 735 Educational 95 183 317 312 907 Drama 25 34 36 44 139 Do not attend 20 44 47 45 156 Crime 5 19 19 29 72 ———— 2383 The influence exercised by certain pictures is exemplified by some of the answers Mrs. Bartlett received. A sixth-grade child said, “A child that goes in and sees exciting pictures comes out excited and starts playing what we saw and becomes wild.” “Western pictures sometimes make youths go out West to become cowboys and run away from home.” “I like where men has a wife and three children and the wife has a fellow.” “I like where the husbun’s go an play pool and then when there money is gone they go home and take their wife jewels and leave them and never come back again.” “If a person goes to a show he goes to laugh and not to cry, for he has so many troubles at his home.”