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20 PLAN FOR CINEMA
For the nineteenth century, inaugurated by the pitiful catastrophe known as the Industrial Revolution, has handed down to us as heritage a type of free slave whose sole desire, when not engaged upon his mind-benumbing occupation of guarding a machine, is retreat, not into a world of his own imagination stimulated by word or sound, but into a romantic dream-world manufactured for him by someone else. In fact, the nature of his life, taken to a logical conclusion, eventually precludes the possession of any imagination at all. But he is human, this poor wretch ; and being human he is intuitively aware that the mind can give pleasure even if only of a poor, second-rate kind. Hence the proletarian propensity for alcohol. For, in this country, prior to the war, the working man had little outside the public-house with which to occupy himself in his spare time. The coming of the moving-picture housed in its showy palace, distantly akin to the healthy tawdriness of the village fair, provided the Great Alternative. A totally different kind of dope had arrived. And upon examination it was found to be of rather better value for money than the previous one and only kind available. It also had the considerable advantage of not inconveniencing the body. Thus is the intense popularity of cinema (and decline of drunkenness) with the masses accounted for. It is really the substitution of one sort of dope for another; and, on the whole, the new dope is very much better than the old.