BEAUTY-BY THE BOARD

Not least among criticisms of contemporary commercialism are protests against America's fiagrant and immoderate use of bill boards and posters. Despised by the aesthetic, condemned by the nature loving, frowned upon by the "better" minds of press and pulpit, they continue to defy anything and everything but the dust of their neighboring roads.

Yet at last someone has come to their defense--don Quixote like to joust at the legions of culture and criticism. For the "New Republic" has found a champion of billboard beauty who dares to deny that nature is ever beautiful--that man, as exemplified by billboards is always vile. "This attitude," he writes, "is illogical and irreligious. There are vast stretches in New Jersey and Nebraska where billboards give life to dull vistas and a reminder that life is tolerably active elsewhere."

So here at last is proper championship for the maligned denizens of the broad highway. And the defense is sound. Who, indeed, could suffer the meadows of Jersey from a Lehigh car window were it not for the rampant pianos and couchant spark plugs of commercialism which color the horizon? Life's sadder spots are indeed rouged to good purpose by the devices of bill posting.

Yet this don Quixote, in the splendor of his struggle, forgets, perhaps, the necessity of an occasional bit of drabness in landscape as well as in life. There are still those who enjoy the mists of a dull November morning in a marsh without "Even your best friend won't tell you" to worry the drab winged duck. Billboards may support nature admirably--it is only fair to realize how admirably they can nurse her failings. Yet for some they will never need to--nature, even in New Jersey or Nebraska, has an occasional good friend.