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MOTION PICTURE COMMISSION. 183 ings on next Tuesday. The gentlemen who desire to appear must agree among themselves as to the distribution of time, and then we will abide by it. But the hearings will close on Tuesday next, when we will have two hours. So you will appear on Tuesday? Mr. ScHECHTER. I will appear next Tuesday. Dr. Crafts. I shall liope that the proponents of the bill may have the closing half hour, as is usual. Will that be understood? Will you agree that w^e can have the closing half hour? Mr. ScHECHTER. I do not know that I shall take more than an hour and a half, and then it will be for the committee to decide aa to the balance of the time. Dr. Crafts. If the committee will assign us the last half hour we will be glad to feel that it has been reserved for us. ADDITIONAL STATEMENT OF DR. WILBUR F. CRAFTS. Dr. Craits. Mr. Chairman, it is a pleasure for me to have arrived just in time to be at this hearing, for I have been with the people and I have been with the pictures. This matter has been discussed this morning very much as though it was a District of Columbia matter. This is a national matter. I have been saying within the last few days in Kansas how much I admired the rAotion pictures when they were good; that prohibition States should have motion' picture exhibitions in place of saloons as the best place for everj^body to get 5 cents worth of forgetfulness—elders, preachers, and every-r body else. It is my firm conviction that the motion picture is going to have a very much larger realm and a great deal more patronage on the part of the better class of people when we can assure them that there is adequate censorship by men appointed by President Wilson, I met the manager of the Southern Methodist Publishing House at Dallas, and he said to me: "I could sell many, many of these ineX' pensive motion-picture machines to churches if only we could be sure of getting good pictures." Quite a number have bought them for churches, but have found trouble in that there are four films a day which they must pay for whether they use them or not, and many of these are not such as can be presented in churches. Mr, ScHECHTER. Will you please be specific when you say the pictures are such that they can not be exhibited in churches? I may say that mention has only been made of three pictures in the entire hearings that have been thrown out. Dr. Crafts. I can give you specific cases. I have seen many such motion pictures myself. However, the point I am making, is that I am not opposed to motion pictures; what we want is to have the pictures censored by those who know the difference between a mur- der in Hamlet and a murder in a " wild west" scene; who know the difference between the treatment of the social evil in The Scarlet Letter and the treatment of it in exhibitions of the white-slave traffic. We want censors of large views of art, large views of psychology, men who know the young and the old and the country, such men as Mr. Wilson would appoint, who would supervise this matter so that when the pictures have been passed there can be some assurance that they would be fit for general exhibition.