Let us look more in detail into the data which furnish reason for the hope expressed above that the screen may eventually fulfill its loftiest mission to mankind. What is there in the phenomena at present manifested in the realm of the movies that justifies our optimism? Suppose we turn first to D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” recently dubbed by a noted critic “a celluloid _Peter Pan_ which will never grow old.” Year after year this early and revolutionary achievement of a far-sighted producer finds a new and enthusiastic public, opening the eyes, as it did at the outset, of despondent doubters to the possibilities of the screen as a dignified and uplifting interpreter of significant crises in the history of a people. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” was also the birth of a new era for the screen. I have taken the liberty above to refer to my early inclination to become a movie fan, to my disgust and revolt as the screen for years failed to show regard for its higher possibilities, and to my comparatively recent renewal of a hope that had been almost destroyed by the photoplay’s youthful indiscretions—to use a term rather mild and inadequate. I am sure that I shall speak of an experience that came to a large number of Americans, who had given up the movies as hopeless, when I say that “The Birth of a Nation” revived in me the conviction that the screen has before it a great future, a splendid mission, a message to deliver to humanity that may atone eventually for its juvenile sins of omission and commission. For the first time, so far as I was concerned, this Griffith picture revealed to me a fact, of which I had long been vaguely conscious, that the screen was not inherently a medium for pandering to the grossest passions in human nature, for visualizing merely the social phenomena that years ago gave to the Jack Harkaway stories and the _Police Gazette_ their vogue. D. W. Griffith had put into concrete form a conception of the movies as a vehicle of combined entertainment and enlightenment that had, for the first time, made all things worth while possible to the screen. In that corner of the Temple of Fame dedicated to the real benefactors of the latest, and probably the last, method of telling great stories to a tale-loving race, to the names of Muybridge, Edison, Eastman and Paul must, in all justice, be added the name of Griffith. And there are other producers worthy of mention in this connection. Rex Ingram, who gave us “The Four Horsemen” and “The Prisoner of Zenda”; William de Mille, whom we have to thank for “Clarence” and “Grumpy”; Fred Niblo, who screened “The Famous Mrs. Fair” and “Blood and Sand,” come to mind as among those who have seen, as has Griffith, the higher possibilities of the movie.