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cerning amusements he held that all amusement
was bad. He thought the only use of it was to
keep idle people out of mischief. A good conscience,
 he says, kills the taste for frivolity. It
was, so he thought, discontent with self, the
burden of ignorance and effeteness, the boredom
of life, the lack or loss of simple and natural
tastes and emotions that made amusements necessary.
 Now this is too severe and stern a view;
but there is too much truth in it for us to dismiss
it altogether ; indeed, it would seem altogether
justified by experience of the diversions and relaxations
 provided for the people in our towns.
These are, as Rousseau would have pointed out,
wholly bad, both in themselves and in their
effects. The self-seeking purveyors of cheap
amusement are men incapable of better things.
They are unprincipled money-makers whose aim
is to collect the pence of the wage-earners. They
go the shortest way to work by appealing to the
universal animal emotions that are easiest to
excite; as may be seen in the Cinema-films
supplied to us from Germany and America.
Now it happens that this trifling with the