Of course, we have with us always the carper and the skeptic, the pessimist who argues that one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and that Will H. Hays, capable of organizing victory for the Republican Party and of improving our Postal Service, is essaying an impossible task when he endeavors to widen and make permanent the loftier scope that Griffith and other praiseworthy producers have given to the screen. But these atrabilious knockers, short-sighted, narrow-minded, and unimaginative, have failed to take a bird’s-eye view of the varied influences and enterprises now in action with the avowed purpose of perpetuating the impetus given to the better type of photoplay by the permanent success of “The Birth of a Nation.” Cannot even the most uncompromising pessimist admit that from those pioneer days when a crude scenario written by a cub office-boy was screened, for want of better material at hand, to the present moment when there is nothing too majestic in the imaginings of master-fictionists to deter the camera, become a dramatist, from making use thereof, there has been an upward trend of the movies that is not merely encouraging but intoxicating? There may be, here and there, of course, a man of letters, not sufficiently broadened by his wide reading, who considers the screening of an immortal novel by Dumas, Dickens, Victor Hugo, or other wonder-worker in narrative literature, a kind of sacrilege which he will always refuse to countenance. To him the Robin Hood of song and story is a revered personage upon whom Douglas Fairbanks has cast of late something of a slight. Let Alfred Noyes write musical verse about the picturesque bandits of Sherwood Forest, but, in the name of the Great God of Letters, don’t allow the new art that the screen has made possible lay profane hands upon a hero whom Literature adopted long ago! Little good will it do to their ridiculous cause, of course, for lettered reactionaries at this late day to attempt to protect the library from the scenario-writer. The screen has an insatiable maw for dramatic tales, old and new, and more and more, as time passes, will the telling of tales in the universal language of the eye become a factor in race-enlightenment.