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The World Before Your Eyes
By Prof. Frederick Starr, of Chicago University
I have seen Niagara thunder over her gorge in the noblest frenzy ever beheld by man — I have watched a Queensland river under the white light of an Australasian moon go whirling and swirling thru strange islands lurking with bandicoot and kangaroo — I have watched an English railroad train draw into a station, take on its passengers and then chug away with its stubby little engine thru the Yorkshire Dells, past old Norman Abbeys silhouetted against the skyline, while a cluster of century-aged cottages loomed up in the valley below, thru which' a yokel drove his flocks of Southdowns — T have been to the Orient and gazed at the water-sellers and beggars and dervishes — I have beheld fat old Rajahs with the price of a thousand lives be jeweled in their monster turbans, and the price of a thousand deaths sewn in their royal nightshirts as they indolently swayed in golden howdahs, borne upon the backs of grunting elephants — I saw a runaway horse play battledoor and shuttlecock with the citizens and traffic of a little Italian village, whose streets had not known so much commotion since the sailing of Columbus — I know how the Chinaman lives and I have been thru the homes of the Japanese — I have marveled at the daring of Alpine tobogganists and admired the wonderful skill of Norwegian ski jumpers — I have seen armies upon the battlefield and their return in triumph — I have looked upon weird dances ind outlandish frolics in every quarter of the globe, and I didn't have to leave Chicago for a moment. No books have taught me all these
wonderful things — no lecturer has pictured them — I simply dropped into a moving picture theatre at various moments of leisure, and at the total cost for all the visits of perhaps two performances of a foolish musical show, I have learned more than a traveler could see at the cost of thousands of dollars and years of journey.
Neither you nor I fully realize what the moving picture has meant to us, and what it is going to mean. As children we used to dream of a journey on a magician's carpet to the legendary lands, but we can rub our own eyes now and witness more tremendous miracles than Aladdin could have by rubbing his fairy lamp. But we're so matter-of-fact that we never think of it that way. We're living at a mile-a-second gait in the swiftest epoch of the world's progress — in the age of incredibilities come true. We fly thru the air — chat with our friends in Paris by squirting a little spark from a pole on one shore of 'the Atlantic to another pole on the other side, and so we take as a matter of course that which our great-grandfathers would have declared a miracle.
The moving picture is making for us volumes of history and action — it is not only the greatest impulse of entertainment but the mightiest force of instruction. We do not analyze the fact that when we read of an English wreck we at once see an English train before us, or when we learn of a battle that an altogether different panorama is visualized than our former erroneous impression of a handto-hand conflict — we are familiar with the geography of Europe — we are well acquainted with how the Frenchman
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