The screen may well be represented to our mind’s eye as a modern Hamlet who says to a blood-stained Mother Earth: Look here upon this picture—and upon this! I show you to yourself as you have been—and to yourself as you may be. Look here at the horrors and devastation, the cruelties and crimes of yesterday and to-day. Then turn your eyes upon the world of to-morrow as I shall reveal it to you in its splendid possibilities—a new world, peaceful, industrious, contented, going forward from one great triumph in progressive civilization to another, differing from the earth that was and is as light from darkness, as day from night! I show you the way, I reveal to you the decision that you must make. If yours be the baser choice, if you continue to repeat, generation after generation, the old blunders, the old crimes, I shall not be to blame. I, the screen, show you two roads, the one leading upward, the other downward. You may, by seeing your racial soul in the mirror I hold up to you, go to Heaven or to Hades. Your journey’s end depends not upon me but upon you. What does Man crave—what has he always craved? Freedom. Freedom from what? From avoidable ills—preventable diseases, unnecessary poverty, unjustifiable wars, preventable accidents, every ill, in short, that not only darkens his life but offends his intelligence. The history of mankind [says Louis Berman, M.D.] is a long research into the nature of the machinery of freedom. All recorded history, indeed, is but the documentation of that research. Viewed thus, customs, laws, institutions, sciences, arts, codes of morality and honor, systems of life, become inventions, come upon, tried out, standardized, established until scrapped in everlasting search for more and more perfect means of freeing body and soul from their congenital thralldom to a host of innumerable masters. Indeed, the history of all life, vegetable and animal, of bacillus, elephant, orchid, gorilla, as well as of man is the history of a searching for freedom. At last, through his own astounding but too-often misdirected ingenuity, Man has found that which alone could remove from his limbs the shackles that have held him captive throughout the centuries. He has discovered a universal language that may conceivably bring about the brotherhood of the race and the reduction to a minimum of the ills that flesh is heir to. But with the coming of the Esperanto of the Eye the salvation of the race is not assured. While the screen may minimize eventually the evils that spring from a world-wide confusion of tongues, it can permanently eradicate those evils only by the dissemination of a message that shall exert an uplifting influence upon the perturbed soul of humanity. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XV