THE BIG PARADE

The last Boston performance of "The Big Parade" takes place tonight, and its departure throws into more salient relief one of the most interesting evidences of what is without doubt a sociological phenomenon of no small significance. That attitude of the American public toward the idea of war which is revealed by the success of such a film is one of the most auspicious auguries of the future meanings of the word peace.

Leagues of Nations have been suggested before. Conferences of diplomats come not without precedent. Schemes and plans for restraining man's aggressive instincts have been broached. But it is not in any such fundamentally illegitimate liaison as that of naval science and academic culture that the solution is to be found. Plato and Ludovico II Moro may only make our marines the better fighters. It is only in the stimulation of some sort of national consciousness of the horrors of organized warfare that peace may be assured.

It may, of course, be said that such a film as that which Laurence Stallings has produced, like "What Price Glory" like post-war "horror" fiction, is only an intensified reaction. There has been a certain sophistication and a certain weariness in the reaction of the last eight years, however, which must help to keep the idealism of pacifists from too lofty soaring. Every human being is by definition a pacifist. But it is only in the realization by human beings, a realization that is quickened and crystallized by such social influences on public opinion as "The Big Parade", that they are pacifists, that the impossible will ever be produced.