The youngest of the arts, like the oldest, has confined itself practically to war and love. But the screen drama has been more reprehensible than poetry in that, in its youth, it has chosen to glorify the kind of warfare that is least worthy of public exploitation, namely, the eternal conflict that goes on between the lawless and the law-abiding, between the crook and the constable, between the underworld and the upper. Realizing that the scenario-writer, like the playwright, must base a dramatic story upon some kind of clash or combat, our photoplay producers for nearly a quarter of a century have permitted the screen to concern itself too often with a crude type of melodrama that was untrue to life and offensive to good taste, obtaining the clash essential to its being by the same methods employed by the dime-novelists of fifty years ago. And as the screen depicted, in its quest for drama, a type of ignoble, petty warfare, so did it indulge in a debasing use of the passion of love in its early efforts to make financial hay while the camera clicked. The rake and the vampire, the seducer and the siren, the vicious and their victims deified in the movies official sociological statistics and gradually led a large percentage of the public toward the belief, subconscious, perhaps, that the respectable element in our communities is wholly negligible, that the world is made up almost entirely of the pursuers and the pursued, with illicit love as the motive force. The Eighteenth Amendment to our Federal Constitution informed an amazed generation that we Americans are strongly influenced by an inherited puritanical strain; but while, as a nation, we were adopting Prohibition, we were flocking daily by the millions to gaze at photoplays sufficiently shocking to draw our forefathers protesting from their graves. Consistency is not a jewel possessed, as has been repeatedly proved since Cromwellian days, by the Puritan. When, in our beloved country, he gave up winking at the bar-tender he betook himself to the movies and winked at the bar-sinister. But his conscience troubled him, and presently he began to talk to his fellow-Roundheads about the shortcomings of the screen. The Puritans had triumphed recently over the saloon. Would it not be possible for them, they asked each other, to eliminate presently from the movie the debasing features that have disgraced its youth?