The music plays softly and the inexorable film, like the reel of life itself, spins on, announcing

   At this theatre
   All next week

   Maggie may
      and
   Walter Curran
      in
   is it worth it

And after that I can imagine the audience dispersing, and the now educated children going off to their homes and one saying as he enters—­

“Gee, I seen a great picture show at school to-day.”

“Yes?” says his mother, “and what was it?”

“Oh, it was all about a gink that went round the cabarets trying to sell an invention what he’d got but nobody wouldn’t look at it till at last one dame gave him three oyster boats, see? and so he and a lot of other guys loaded them up and hiked off across the ocean.”

“And where did he go to?”

“Africa.  And he and the other guys had a great stand in with the natives and he’d have sold his invention all right but one old dame got him alone in a hut and poisoned him and took it off him.”

That, I think, is about the way the film would run.  When it is finished I must get President Shurman, or whoever it was, to come and see it.

4.—­Politics from Within

To avoid all error as to the point of view, let me say in commencing that I am a Liberal Conservative, or, if you will, a Conservative Liberal with a strong dash of sympathy with the Socialist idea, a friend of Labour, and a believer in Progressive Radicalism.  I do not desire office but would take a seat in the Canadian Senate at five minutes notice.

I believe there are ever so many people of exactly this way of thinking.

Let me say further than in writing of “politics” I am only dealing with the lights and shadows that flicker over the surface, and am not trying to discuss, still less to decry, the deep and vital issues that lie below.

Yet I will say that vital though the issues may be below the surface, there is more clap-trap, insincerity and humbug on the surface of politics than over any equal area on the face of any institution.

The candidate, as such, is a humbug.  The voters, as voters—­not as fathers, brothers or sons—­are humbugs.  The committees are humbugs.  And the speeches to the extent of about ninety per cent are pure buncombe.  But, oddly enough, out of the silly babel of talk that accompanies popular government, we get, after all, pretty good government—­infinitely better than the government of an autocratic king.  Between democracy and despotic kingship lies all the difference between genial humbug and black sin.

For the candidate for popular office I have nothing but sympathy and sorrow.  It has been my fortune to walk round at the heels of half a dozen of them in different little Canadian towns, watching the candidate try in vain to brighten up his face at the glad sight of a party voter.