Reel Life (Sep 1913 - Mar 1914)

QCIB293043 MswYork, Novetiiber I, 1913 CLARENCE HERBERT NEW, Editor WM. H. PECKHAM, Business Manager MUTUAL FILM CORPORATION, Publishers, 71 Wall Street Five Cents the Copy Circulation This Week 26,000 ^,2.50 by the Year Open L'Btlm' to th^) Omtlemm 'Y/}\o .^r:5 About Gentlemen — be successful. But, in starting out to accomplish this, be quite sure that you understand the real meaning of the word in its originally intended sense. If your ideas as to success are represented by the dollar sign alone, it will be wasting your time to consider these remarks— ^because that sort of man is in rather a hopeless postion and is not in as good standing, now, as he has been for some time. Perhaps j'Ou haven't noticed it — but there is an increasingly evident change in public opinion, each year, as to the amount of grafting and other conscienceless operations a public official may indulge himself in at the people's expense, and get away with it. Those of us who will vote to put you in office have a sneaking hope that your hands are clean and that you will be able to keep them so throughout your public career. It's only a hope, mind you — because we appreciate the strength of the pressure which has become customary through years of public looting. Those of us who intend voting against you, next Tuesday, will do so from a fixed belief that — from force of environment and secret political obligations — ^you are already hopeless in this respect. It's most emphatically up to you to justify the faith of your friends and prove the rest of us wrong in the estimate we have previously formed of you. Of course, it's a little severe to single out you politicians for hints of this sort when your methods and aims do not dififer so very widely from those of a great many people in commercial and other walks of 20th Century life. But their actions are so thoroughly covered up — until the final catastrophes — that it's impossible to keep tabs on them until a receiver is appointed or they purchase tickets for Canada. In your case, the way you vote on any bill is closely watched — by some of us — and we draw our conclusions accordingly. If appearances are too glaringly raw, we raise a howl and focus the attention of a million others upon you. Of course, the opportunities to get away with it are still fairly good in political life. Up to a certain point, it's still a fairly safe gamble. But the people are becoming increasingly watchful and intolerant as to this sort of thing. You never can be quite sure that it won't be your particular case which is suddenly exposed to the limelight at a moment when you feel the most secure. To be sure, the penalties may not seem to you the sort which cannot be outlived. There is, we'll admit, a satisfaction in that fifty or hundred thousand dollars — securely banked where no one can touch it — guaranteeing you an old age of ease and plenty when you finally graduate from Sing Sing or the equivalent hostelry in other States. But, gentlemen, there is something rather pitiful in smirching for all eternity what has been an old and honorable name When you're dead, your'e a long time dead — ^very true — one of this life's greatest truisms. And yet — it's still the fashion to mark the average man's grave with a tombstone— and it rather offends the aesthetic sense to have that tombstone an ineffaceable reproach to generations yet unborn, bearing the same name. Probably it would be difficult to define in mere words just what it is that constitutes the essentials of honesty and square dealing in our complex modern life. So many actions are on the statute books as crimes which modern opinion does not brand as crimes at all. But, take it forward and backward through all the ages of history — through the centuries yet in the womb of time — you can't come much nearer the mark than the simple provisions of the Golden Rule: Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. Now— a word or two as to the meaning of the word Success. In the last quarter-century, we Americans have become accustomed— largely through a life and death struggle for existence with alien races who are dumped each year into our ports of entry — to represent it by the symbol ; "$.'' But in the grey afternoon of life — in the waning twilight, when the shadows lengthen and we look back upon the fine, and great, and beautiful things we vowed in our youth to accomplish — there is an emptiness, a bitterness, in the contemplation of that "$." if it stands alone as the sum and substance of our earthly accomplishment. Have we been a real friend to those who knew, and trusted and loved us — once? "$'' Have we done that which every moral and ethical law urged us to do for those less fortunate — when it lay within our power to do? "$" Have we justified the faith and trust our friends and relatives had in us at the beginning — of the consideration they have repeatdely shown for us, not altogether deserved, in after years? "$" Is our life, in its twilight, such that its passing will mean real loss and regret to those who know or are bound to us — or will its passing bring relief, and a desire for forgetfulness ? "$" Have we accomplished one solitary thing which justified our existence, and education — which will be remembered as worth doing — fifty years after our death ? Consider, gentlemen— what the word Success really means. To those in private life who may try on the shoe of these remarks, we can only say that a change is slowly but surely taking place in the general viewpoint as to the manner of living and doing business. It is to be hoped they also may change with the times and assist in the general uplift. But to you. .gentlemen zahose every action is sure to be pilloried in the daily press, we urge consideration of the fact that it pays to be clean and straight — every time.