History as told by the screen in the class-room—is it not possible that the destiny of mankind is thus to be decided? The plastic minds of the young intrigued by the story of Man’s rise from protoplasm to poet, from amœba to aeronaut, from cave-man to lord of creation may be so impressed, within the next few generations, by the tragic absurdity of civilized man’s periodical reversions to savagery that some divine day the enlightened youth of the world will go out on a universal strike against old idiocies and cruelties, and to the screen that taught history will be given the glory of bringing mankind at one bound within striking distance of the millennium. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIV THE MOVIE TAKES ON NEW FUNCTIONS _Solves Many Problems—Becomes Actor, Artist, Singer, Scientist, Teacher, Drummer—As a Hamlet Shows Mother Earth Two Pictures—Will the Race Go Up or Go Down—The Screen Possibly a Savior._ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIV THE MOVIE TAKES ON NEW FUNCTIONS HAS a race harassed, well-nigh hopeless, forever committing old errors under new incitements, found in the screen both a pedagogue and a peacemaker, potent for rescue if its possibilities are grasped in time? The query may seem fantastic, the hope it suggests quixotic, the promise at which it hints premature. But the question is, perhaps, the most important before the world to-day and upon its answer may depend the future of the race. In an address before the National Civic Federation at Washington, D. C., on January 17, 1923, Elihu Root said: The manifest purpose of the great body of voters in democratic countries to control directly the agents who are carrying on the foreign affairs of their countries involves a terrible danger as well as a great step in human progress—a great step in progress if the democracy is informed, a terrible danger if the democracy is ignorant. An ignorant democracy controlling foreign affairs leads directly to war and the destruction of civilization. An informed democracy insures peace and the progress of civilization.