It is not safe to always reckon a man's merit by the sale of his books. The author of "Old Sleuth" measured in that way would be the greatest American writer, in fact, the greatest writer of any time. You can't reckon the sale of such books by numbers; you reckon them by tons. It is easy to make a book sell, but the thing is to produce an original work of art, to put something forth with the imprint of your own personality as a creative artist. I believe old Walt Whitman stated the whole problem when he said: "All that the past was not, the future will be." I do not believe that the future of the world is to be a future of war. I believe it is to be a future of industrial peace as Professor Pearson [Charles W. Pearson] has indicated. And I believe that the literature and the art of that future will not be based upon war; it will be humanitarian, and at its best always an individual statement of life. In other words, the whole tendency of modern art is towards the celebration of the individual by the individual, and you cannot class writers in any hard and fast division. There is not an artist living who delineates "things as they are." There is not a writer living holding that for a theory, or who has that desire for a fundamental impulse. Art is selection, and upon the individual soul of the creative artist is laid the burden of choice. It is in the way he chooses his material and in the way he works it out that he is to be judged. He may be a story-teller like Stevenson, or he may be a novelist like Zangwill. All I ask of him is just simply this--he must be an individual creative artist; he must not repeat, must not imitate for the sake of gain. JOHN GILBERT PLAYING "OLD MEN" PARTS [Speech of John Gilbert at a banquet given by the Lotos Club in recognition of the fiftieth anniversary of his first appearance on the stage, New York City, November 30, 1878. The chairman of the dinner was Whitelaw Reid, President of the Lotos.]