The power of the screen to divert trade from one country to another is a subject that has been hitherto little discussed. An article in _Commerce Reports_, the weekly survey of foreign trade issued by the United States Department of Commerce, however, declares that the motion pictures displayed in foreign countries influence the consuming public in the choice of markets. In fact, so great has been the influence of the motion picture in diverting commerce to the United States that foreign newspapers have already cautioned their film producers not to ignore the opportunities for commercial expansion that are inherent in the drama shown on the screen. As Terence remarked long ago, so might the movie remark to-day: “Nothing that is of interest to mankind is outside of my sphere of endeavor.” In an address delivered last year at the University of Pennsylvania, Sir Auckland Geddes, British Ambassador to the United States, said: It is hard to find ground upon which our civilization can certainly and safely stand in the future. As one looks around the world to-day and sees in country after country the power, the direction of force, passing from the hands of the people who have long held that power, sees wealth being destroyed, sees all the surplus margin of wealth disappear, one realizes—not immediately but looking forward into the future—that we have cause to take steps to spread the appreciation of research, so that no shift of political power can possibly take place that will not keep it in the hands of those who understand the importance of research. Research! From generation to generation, mankind has been engaged in making investigations and discoveries that have constantly enriched and enlarged the treasure-house of human knowledge. But research, by which, as the British Ambassador asserts, civilization may save itself from destruction, has been hitherto an affair of specialists, not of the multitude, an activity carried on in laboratories or in desert solitudes or on lonely mountain-tops, and its results have been made manifest only to the erudite few. But, lo, through the screen the movie theatre becomes at one moment a laboratory, at another a desert solitude, at another a lonely mountain-top. Audiences of millions become experimenters in all realms of research, temporary astronomers, physicists, chemists, travellers, hunters, entomologists, ornithologists, archæologists—what you will. Erudition is fed to the masses in small quantities, and the more they eat of it the more they crave. “Know thyself!” cried the old Greek Philosopher to the individual man. “Know thyself!” exclaims the screen to the race at large, and proceeds to show to mankind the way to that universal self-knowledge that, if it comes to man in time, may protect his future from the blunders, crimes and tragedies that have disgraced his past.