Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/62

 few moments on some of the urgent matters that concern the world now—say the League of Nations—it would be a wonderful aid to good citizenship. The movies are blindly groping their way, by means of current-event films, war films and the like, toward an era in which they will play a leading and indispensable part in education and civic life.

It should be a function of every large city government to provide "municipal movies," by which we mean not free motion-picture shows, but reels of film distributed free among all the motion-picture theatres in the city, exhibiting various phases of municipal activity and illustrating by suggestion how citizens may co-operate to increase the welfare of the community. We hear a good deal about street-cleaning evils, about rapid-transit problems, about traffic congestion, about the evils of public spitting, the danger of one-way streets and a score of other matters. All these could be interestingly illuminated on the screen, with serious intent, and yet with the racy human touch that always enlivens the common affairs of men. And when some discussion arises that concerns us all, such as the character of the proposed war memorial, various types of memorials could be illustrated in films to stimulate public suggestion as to what is most fitting for our environment. None of us know our own city as well as we would like to. Let the city government, through some film bureau, show us our own citizens at work and