What Judge Landis is endeavoring to do for our national game and Augustus Thomas for our stage is, in a general way, what Will H. Hays has been called upon to effect in the field of the motion picture. For a quarter of a century the movies in America, if not going from bad to worse had shown no marked signs of repentance for their early indiscretions. Cut-throat competition had long exercised its evil influence upon the industry and the law of the jungle had prevailed in its financial affairs. How this new commercial activity, despite its unbusinesslike methods, its apparent disregard of the economic laws that are said to underlie all competitive industries, and its seemingly happy-go-lucky indifference to the multiplication-table actually forged its way upward until it placed itself high on the list of the business enterprises of this country is a marvel and a mystery that only financial wizards could explain. When Will H. Hays resigned as Postmaster General of the United States to enter, in a position of commanding influence, the motion-picture field he became an important factor in an industry whose growth has been one of the marvels of the world’s commercial history. It was no longer a peripatetic gambler, out-at-heels one day and affluent the next, but a vast business enterprise sufficiently prosperous to afford the luxury of a general house-cleaning. It is easier for the well-to-do to be respectable than for the down-and-outs, and the movies had reached a point financially when, without disastrous monetary sacrifice, they could essay the task of shortening their list of sins of omission and commission. Going to the root recently of the new influences at work in the motion picture realm, and of his official connection with them, Hays said: There has been some query as to just what this effort which the industry is making at this time is all about. It is simply that those men who make and distribute pictures have associated themselves to do jointly those things in which they are mutually but non-competitively interested, having as the chief purposes of such association two great objectives—and I quote verbatim from the formal articles of association, which have been filed in the office of the Secretary of State at Albany, N.Y.: “Establishing and maintaining the highest possible moral and artistic standards in motion picture production and developing the educational as well as the entertainment value of the motion picture.”