In so far as the libraries are concerned, the movies have begun to exhaust the resources vouchsafed to them by the writers of the past. Their fate is like that which menaces our nation in connection with our forests. For many years we have been cutting down our trees without taking thought for the morrow by providing for a new growth of forest where our improvident axe has had its wanton way. The screen has recklessly leveled both its giant sequoias and its scrub-oaks and finds itself in sore straits for timber that will stand the strain it puts upon it. The younger generation of fiction-writers are not furnishing the studios with material with which to repair the gaps made as the romances of the past are, one by one, fed to the capacious maw of the hungry screen. Mark Twain asserted that there were only seven original stories in existence—or was it thirty?—and inferred that the latest novel by the most original of contemporary writers must be, of necessity, a variation upon one of these ancient, basic yarns. There still exists the suspicion that our greatest humorist was “spoofing us,” as an Englishman would say. But the output of fiction to-day, both in America and Europe, leads to the conclusion that our imaginative writers were not born to the purple as master plot-makers. They repeatedly shock us, sometimes disgust us, often interest and amuse us, constantly furnish us with food for reflection and apprehension, and once in awhile startle us by their brilliancy—but, for the most part, their novels do not “screen well.” They lack, as a class, the absorbing narrative interest that makes tales like “Monte Cristo,” “Les Misérables,” “Lorna Doone,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” and many other masterpieces of the older generation of romancers, effective on the screen. They seem to be influenced by the fear that Mark Twain was right in his depressing generalization, and that it is better to put forth a novel with little or no plot than to be accused of employing modern methods for telling an ancient tale. From these modern fictionists the screen asks for bread and they give it a stone—sometimes a precious or semi-precious stone, but not what the newest and hungriest of the arts needs for its continued sustenance. This is the more remarkable because of the fact that we are living in an age more stimulating to the imaginative mind than any of its predecessors. We are called upon to rebuild a shattered world, to salvage what was of value in a dethroned civilization and to reconstruct the affairs of mankind upon new bases. It is no figure of speech [remarks President Harding, in his recent message to Congress], to say that we have come to the test of our civilization. The world has been passing—is to-day passing—through a great crisis. The conduct of war itself is not more difficult than the solution of the problems which necessarily follow.