As a means of supplying drama to America as a whole our commercialized professional theatre has broken down. The reasons need not concern us here. They are many, no doubt. One, of course, is the rise of the motion pictures, which are cheaper to present and to witness, and which enable the local theatre manager to keep his house open six or seven days in the week. Another reason is the increased cost of transportation. Another reason is the complication of modern life, even in the “provinces,” so that the theatre, having to compete against other attractions (or distractions), no longer appeals so universally, or at any rate no longer finds all the people with the surplus cash to patronize it at the excessive modern scale of prices. Later on in the essay quoted above its author speaks of himself as one of those “who love the drama and believe the movies a mean and stupefying substitute for its imaginative and intellectual appeal.” If Mr. Eaton’s opinion of the screen, as thus forcibly expressed, is based upon its past, the past of a Prodigal Son utterly unworthy of the fatted calf, it is not, as the reader of what I have thus far written will admit, without reasonable justification. But is not the present of the movies encouraging, is not their future promising? Succeeding chapters of this book will, I hope, go to prove that Mr. Eaton is too hasty in assuming that eventually the screen may not atone for any seeming damage it may have done to the stage. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER V THE MOVIE DEVELOPS A CONSCIENCE _Grows up in the Slums—Used and Abused as a Money-Getter—Goes from Bad to Worse—Will Hays Called to the Rescue—Pulpit, Press and Playwrights Thunder Against it—The Responsibility of the Public—The Light in the Darkness._ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER V THE MOVIE DEVELOPS A CONSCIENCE NOT long ago the good people of Stratford-on-Avon, England, arose in their might, held a great mass meeting, and decreed that Shakespeare’s birthplace should not be desecrated by the movies. Lacking sufficient clairvoyance to realize that possibly the motion picture of the near future, with its natural colors and its synchronization of movement with the tones of the human voice, may be destined to give Shakespeare a new lease of life and a larger public than he has hitherto possessed, the Stratford-on-Avonites were not without justification for the protest they registered against the more or less disreputable pictures that threatened to invade a shrine hitherto dedicated to the loftiest achievement the realm of the drama can boast. But Shakespeare’s birthplace will see the day when its inhabitants will repent of the narrow-mindedness they have shown as regards the movies.