It is not many years since the pageant began to be taken up in this country as a form of artistic expression. When we began to realize how strangely romantic our course of history as an American people had been, when we viewed our past struggle to subdue the soil and overcome the difficulties of pioneering as a most tragic story, as a heart-moving tale fitted for the great epic and for the great tragic drama, then we felt the impulse to place these tales of old-time heroism in fitting artistic form before the eyes of the people. It was not without meaning that the desire to express in dramatic form the pictures of our historic past had its earliest origins not in the metropolitan square but on the village green, with a background not of skyscrapers but of sequoia groves. Again we see rural conditions more favorable to the budding powers of human genius. There our newly awakened enthusiasm for community betterment promptly seized the pageant as a fitting means of expressing its urgent emotion. Looking forward into the future we desired to express our hopes for enlargement as we had expressed our vision of the meaning of past struggles. There are plain reasons why this loose and easy dramatic form is especially adapted for the use of a town or village when it wishes to portray dramatically its own historic and community experiences. In fact, American pageantry has had from the earliest attempts a distinct reference to the welfare of the community and to the development of the rich resources of fellowship to be found in concerted action. This was amply shown at Thetford, Vermont, where one of the earliest and most successful pageants was given. That was as late as 1911. The author of the text frankly stated that the pageant seemed to him the expression of a movement for the general development of the resources of the town, agricultural, educational and social. The work should become, then, a study of the rural problem, and a contribution toward the effort to make the country town fulfil its ideal as a place to live. In this effort the pageant has been a success; it has proved a molding, unifying and inspiring influence; it has quickened into life the slumbering energies of the people. By awakening pride in the characteristics of the town and the region, interest in the history of their past, and hopes for the better things of the future, it has created a shoulder to shoulder feeling and a vivification of energy that have brought new ideas to life and given courage to try them.