Mr. Harding has grasped fully the significance of the motion picture in connection with the past, present, and future of the race. He has suggested the screening of Wells’s “Outline of History” and of Van Loon’s “Story of Mankind,” and has called attention to the possibility that, under the direction of the Federal Bureau of Standards, films might be taken illustrating the fundamental principles of the science of geology. Realizing, as he does, that ignorance is the enemy democracy, in order to survive, must overcome, and that the surest safeguard to our institutions is enlightenment, President Harding has thrown himself wholeheartedly into that growing movement which is destined eventually, if Fate is kind to us, to make the motion picture worthy in its achievements of the splendid possibilities that are within its grasp. That potent, pushing, perverse offspring of the printing-press, the newspaper, has begun to realize that it can be no longer exclusively typographical but must become in part photographical. It is following in the footsteps of the screen in making use of the only universal language the ingenuity of Man has yet devised. A recent editorial in the New York _Tribune_ says: The _Tribune_ was the first newspaper to adapt for journalistic purposes the printing of the half-tone photograph. The innovation started the rising flood of news-in-pictures which is so distinctive a feature of the American press of 1923.... Some of the events of the day’s news can be visualized for the reader simply by the printed word. Others need the aid of a picture. Others still find presentation possible in a picture alone.... The universal appeal of pictures can be taken advantage of for sound informative and educational purposes, instead of for scandal and filth. Indeed, it should be so used, as the London _Times_ and other conservative newspapers have realized through their daily pages of pictures. “The universal appeal of pictures!” Mankind from the days when our ancestors sketched reindeer upon the walls of their caves has felt their appeal, but only recently has its universality become of crucial significance to the race. The printing-press, as we realized despairingly in 1914, has failed to save civilization from its recurrent attempts at suicide. Men read and talked, and, then, as had their illiterate progenitors, grasped their weapons and went to fighting. Neither from books nor from debates has mankind in the mass grasped that enlightenment which often comes to individuals but which is not sufficiently wide-spread and compelling to defend the race from constant reversions to brutish manifestations.