“Hell is paved with good intentions.” The tragedy that we call human history is made more understandable by these depressing, revelatory words. The fussy, the futile, those whose hearts are kindly but whose brains are weak, whose motives are praiseworthy but whose methods are inept and inadequate, have, from the beginning of time, made life harder than it need be for their fellow-men. When these well-intentioned but badly-balanced busybodies combine with stronger characters whose motives are reprehensibly selfish to mould men in the mass to their own narrow pattern, denying to the individual that freedom of choice regarding his own affairs that is one of the essential bulwarks of Anglo-Saxon civilization, an internal menace has come to American institutions more threatening than any external peril now within our purview. But censorship of the movies will be, in all probability, only a passing and more or less localized phase of our national tendency to indulge in mischievous experimental legislation. If not, however, if censorship should ever become both national and permanent, then would be sounded the doom of those emancipatory institutions which have made of our American experiment in self-government the one great hope, the one burning beacon-light, for an over-governed, over-burdened, over-censored world. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XVII THE MOVIE AS A WORLD LANGUAGE _The Esperanto of the Tongue—Its Rapidly Increasing Vogue—All Countries Taking It Up—Its Inferiority to the Esperanto of the Eye—Together They May Save the World—“The Covered Wagon”—Its Success as a Picture—Rheims Cathedral and a Prairie Schooner Symbols of Man’s Balanced Fate—Will the Race Choose to Construct or to Destroy?_ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XVII THE MOVIE AS A WORLD LANGUAGE