As an uplifting, educational, civilizing force, the movie appears to be approaching the parting of the ways. As has been shown in preceding chapters, it has vastly enlarged its scope and possibilities as an influence, direct or indirect, upon the daily lives of millions of human beings. It has of late solved the major mechanical problems that confronted it. At its present rate of progress, the cinema will soon become more powerful as an influence upon the minds of the masses than are the newspaper, the novel and the play taken together. For the sun never sets upon the screen! Day and night, in all parts of the civilized, and an increasing portion of the uncivilized, globe the motion picture is making its imprint upon the minds and souls of countless millions of men, women and children. It has taken possession of a polyglot world and is speaking daily to the human race in a tongue that is understood as readily on the Congo as at Cambridge. But what is it saying? “Ah, there’s the rub!” Is the screen merely a mirror in which Man looks upon his own face and turns away heedless of what his countenance might have taught him? Has the race finally found a way to that self-knowledge which might mean its eventual salvation only to misuse, as its wont has been, its newest medium for advancement? Can nothing be learned from the screen by the restless, harassed, apprehensive millions of the earth that shall make this first universal method of communication worthy of the possibilities for world-wide uplift that it possesses? The answer to these queries depends largely upon your personal point of view, upon the philosophy of life which dominates your mental processes. If you are influenced by that widely-accepted generalization to the effect that “human nature never changes” you will not be inclined to take seriously our contention that by forcing Man to observe and study, by means of the screen, the blunders, idiocies, crimes and tragedies of his past he may be forced eventually to repent and reform, to make of his future something less reprehensible than his past has been. But human nature is not fixed—it is fluid. It has changed, and it is always in the process of changing. In fact, the time may not be far distant when not only the individual but the race at large, hitherto at the mercy of endocrinal glands, will find in the laboratory methods whereby thyroids and pituitaries and adrenals and the other chemical arbiters of the fate of men and nations may be so dominated by science that human nature will not merely change with heartbreaking slowness for the better but will spring at a bound into its supermanhood.