Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood committees, Sunday car drivers and Lord's Day resters, police and trades unionists ; any of these sects would willingly stage lynching-parties for the other without remorse. Nobody can let anybody else alone ; there is no live and let live; only the mass movement is permitted, an individual opinion, an individual method of behaviour, being a crime against gregariousness. The revivalist yelled at you as you passed: "Are you saved?" The birth-controller pushed you into a corner and hammered you with statistics. This passionate impulse of gratuitously interfering in every one else's business, which is responsible for most of America's purity laws, prohibitions, missionary societies, straw-hat riots, and lynchings, broke out during our stay as a comparatively mild excitement over Mother India. The fact that the book was written by an American vouched for its integrity. England, whose policy in India had hitherto been looked upon as a monstrous crime of hypocrisy, autocracy, and slavery, changed in a moment from a scoundrelly nation to one almost sanctified. The Indians were suddenly exposed for what they were. Women revelled in the crude details of juvenile marriage, and left the book lying about the house for the children to read on the sly. Indian teachers of mystic cults who had been reaping generous harvests found their flocks falling rapidly from them and organized in vain anti-Mother-Indian demonstrations. On the effect of this one book English popularity ran high in Los Angeles until an unfortunate occurrence gave public opinion a right about face. We have already referred to three separate English celebrities who, travelling unofficially, refused to throw off their incognito, repudiating civic welcomes, dinners with the Chamber of Commerce, banquets by the Daughters of the Revolution, and speeches by the Rotary Clubs. The damage, pro tern., to British trade was severe, but also in a trice all the good work done by Mother [264]