Reference has been made to the fact that in the United States, England and France the first exploiters of motion pictures were under the delusion that this new form of entertainment was of merely ephemeral value, that its drawing-power as a theatrical novelty would soon pass away. Thus it was that in this country small men, of small means, hastened to “take flyers” in the latest get-rich-quick device, and throughout the United States was observed a mushroom growth of “picture palaces,” financed on a shoe-string and designed to collect “easy money” before it became uneasy. There were those among the pioneer promoters of motion pictures who had read of the tulip craze in Holland, or of the Mississippi bubble in France, and imagined that the bottom would some day suddenly fall out of the “movie boom,” ruining those who had not “cashed in” in time. They failed to realize that humanity could not afford to lose an inestimable boon that had come to it, namely, a new method for the telling of stories. There had existed, before the movie’s birth, but four media for the dissemination of narratives—the tongue, the play, the printed story, and the printed poem. In the childhood of the race, tale-telling was confined to word of mouth. Later on, the stage came into existence, and mankind’s craving for stories was partially satisfied by the drama. The invention of the printing-press gave to a soul-hungry race the book, with its infinite capacity for telling tales, old and new, to the grown-up children of the race. But from Gutenberg’s time to Edison’s Man had found no new medium through which his eternal craving for stories could be assuaged. Literature and the drama, despite the impetus vouchsafed to them by the printing-press, are of aristocratic origin and have failed to adapt themselves wholeheartedly to the broadening tendencies and demands of the age. Democracy needed a new approach to the romance of existence, an approach that the millions could make without too great a sacrifice, and, lo, the movies blazed the way to it, despite the fact that their advance guard was for the most part unworthy of the high mission that chance had thrust upon it. These pioneers had in their hands the fifth device which Man has found for satisfying his soul’s appetite for inspiring tales, more universal in its appeal than the tongue, the play, the novel or the poem, and many of them degraded it, alienating in the beginning those conservative, constructive forces in the community which have only recently come to the assistance of the screen.