ting libraries. The oncoming
machinery and expense of the motion picture is immense. Where will the
money come from? No one knows. What the people want they will get. The
race of man cannot afford automobiles, but has them nevertheless. We
cannot run away into non-automobile existence or non-steam-engine or
non-movie life long at a time. We must conquer this thing. While the more
stately scientific and educational aspects just enumerated are slowly on
their way, the artists must be up and about their ameliorative work.

Every considerable effort to develop a noble idiom will count in the
final result, as the writers of early English made possible the language
of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. We are perfecting a medium to be
used as long as Chinese ideographs have been. It will no doubt, like the
Chinese language, record in the end massive and classical treatises,
imperial chronicles, law-codes, traditions, and religious admonitions.
All this by the _motion picture_ as a recording instrument, not
necessarily the _photoplay_, a much more limited thing, a form of art.

What shall be done in especial by this generation of idealists, whose
flags rise and go down, whose battle line wavers and breaks a thousand
times? What is the high quixotic splendid call? We know of a group of
public-spirited people who advocate, in endowed films, "safety first,"
another that champions total abstinence. Often their work seems lost in
the mass of commercial production, but it is a good beginning. Such
citizens take an established studio for a specified time and at the end
put on the market a production that backs up their particular idea. There
are certain terms between the owners of the film and the proprietors of
the studio for the division of the income, the profits of the cult being
spent on further propaganda. The product need not necessarily be the type
outlined in chapter two, The Photoplay of Action. Often some other sort
might establish the cause more deeply. But most of the propaganda films
are of the action variety, because of the dynamic character of the people
who produce them. Fired by fanatic zeal, the auto speeds faster, the
rescuing hero runs harder, the stern policeman and sheriff become more
jumpy, all that the audience may be converted. Here if anywhere
meditation on the actual resources of charm and force in the art is a
fitting thing. The crusader should realize that it is not a good Action
Play nor even a good ar