The Forrest City times., 1911-08-04
Modern Standards

favored Tn tne winter, mas been cEOWu- ed out by Steamboat Bill.' This musical effort twice week in Court Square excites more applause than anything else the conductor offers.
 At the parks the latest popular song is story of Mrs Casey Jones second marriage and her divorce.
 Last year the laugh-compelling song at summer theaters was a parody on My Country, Iris of Thee, being story of the rejoicing of a man whose wife had gone away from home for the summer
 In the theatres the stories and jokes that have the greatest vogue are those holding up the husband as hero of an affair in fooling his wife, Or the wife as successfully fooling her hus- band and if these stories do not bring the desired applause, a few smutty aliGsi6Hs to aiilnities are generally us- ed by the actor to get a hand The morning after jokes are too common place to command attention.
 In picture shows where there is no censorship the offerings are deserip- tions of criminal or underworld life. In the higher class theaters Problem Plays are offered. These productions are generally the composition of some sharp rascal who covers a salacious story under a veneer of so-called philosophy, and then insists that the play points a great moral.
 Our best magazines, not daring to go too far in dealing with libertinism. seek to tell the stories that gratify instinct that is in many of us for get ting something for nothing. The weekly paper of the largest circula- tion in the world regaled it's readers with the Confessions of Con Man. :. When this series was worn out. a bunco-steerer was made the hero of a story.
 Another magazine has exploited a gold brick seller, good natured, fat thief, into a hero of one hundred tales. These pictures of rascaldom took so well that they have been dramatized.
 Certain newspapers feel that the ed- ition is incomplete unless there is an illustrated account of woman being sued for divorce or a young girl run. ming away with chauffeur.
 Never in the history of modern civilization is there in music, in art in literature, in the activities of life so much of crassness, vulgarity and obscenity.
 fonng boys are worn out by the excesses in youth and are derelicts before they reach the age of manhood. Young girls too often are out in so- ciety, receiving company and attend ing dances at an age when they should be kept in the seclusion of the home or where their circle of acquaintances should be limited to relatives or the intimate friends of their family.
 If you have examined the society columns of the average newspaper dur ing the past year, you will be surprised at the number of children's parties. Many children have not time during the week to look over the Sunday school lesson. Their time is taken up by picture shows, swimming parties and automobile rides.
 Men themselves do not have much time any more to go to church on Sunday, and what is almost as un- fortunate, they do not have much time to look after their families. The demands of modern life are such that the man ill average station must be supremelY busy every moment in the day in order to meet the expense incident to the complex mode of living. His hours for recreation be ing limited, he seeks 10 strike an average by crowding lot of things in them. The hour or two hours that he once devoted to talking to his wife and children, in reading Dickens and Thackeray, is now given to tearing over the country in an automobile. When the auto is in the shop and he spends an evening at home, his mental machinery is speeded up at such a gait that nothing will interest him short of French novel, or a story of how man made a million in a minute, or a young man who met wooed, won and married million aires daughter in one day.
 Everybody, from the laborer earn ing s2.o0 per day to the buyer and seller of railroads, is speeding up his life. And everybody must pay the toll, and that toll is often the insane asylum, or strong body broken il health, man aged before he is fifty and men and women passing into old age discontented and disappointed They are useless to themselves and useless to the community because the, have fooliShly lived under standards that bring neither contentment il thprp is O0yprfV nor In p,,ipace ;,, +i..