Now just here we come face to face with the most significant, the most tragically important, feature of the tremendous subject with which we are dealing. Is Man, triumphant at last over the evils that befell him at the Tower of Babel, possessing for the first time in his racial career a universal language, actually in possession of soul-stirring truths that, reaching the race at large, shall overcome the powers of darkness menacing our modern civilization? Let me repeat the concluding sentence of the preceding chapter: “While the screen may minimize eventually the evils springing 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.” Shall Christ or Cæsar, idealism or materialism, altruism or animosities, progress or reaction dominate the screen? The importance of the answer that the future makes to this query can not be conceivably over-estimated. To repeat an assertion I made in a preceding chapter, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are struggling for domination over the soul of the screen and the issue of the conflict is still in abeyance. A timely truth finding lodgment in the perturbed souls of men might conceivably save the race from destruction. By means of a modern invention an idea, opportunely dropped from the clouds by heroic airmen behind the German lines, destroyed the morale of the cohorts of reaction and brought victory to the Allied arms. Two things were here essential to success—the message itself and the medium for its dissemination. Of the two, the message is, of course, infinitely the more important. But Wilson’s words, at that special crisis, would have been futile had they not been given wings by Wright. Civilization stands in sore need of a message of a unifying and peace-begetting nature. The screen offers it a medium whereby such a message could be carried to the ends of the earth, to be known of all mankind through the Esperanto of the Eye. But whence shall this message come? By what authority, by what sanction, shall it force itself upon the minds and hearts and souls of all men? If the screen falls eventually wholly into the control of demagogues, a medium for enlightenment that might save the race from the threatening evils of the future will not merely fail to fulfill its highest mission but will become the most powerful weapon of those who would undermine and presently destroy existing civilization.