t architectural projects.

Once the population understand they are dealing with the same type of
idea on a grander scale, they will follow to the end. We are not
proposing an economic revolution, or that human nature be suddenly
altered. If California can remain in the World's Fair state of mind for
four or five years, and finally achieve such a splendid result, all the
states can undertake a similar project conjointly, and because of the
momentum of a nation moving together, remain in that mind for the length
of the life of a man.

Here we have this great instrument, the motion picture, the fourth
largest industry in the United States, attended daily by ten million
people, and in ten days by a hundred million, capable of interpreting the
largest conceivable ideas that come within the range of the plastic arts,
and those ideas have not been supplied. It is still the plaything of
newly rich vaudeville managers. The nation goes daily, through intrinsic
interest in the device, and is dosed with such continued stories as the
Adventures of Kathlyn, What Happened to Mary, and the Million Dollar
Mystery, stretched on through reel after reel, week after week. Kathlyn
had no especial adventures. Nothing in particular happened to Mary. The
million dollar mystery was: why did the millionaires who owned such a
magnificent instrument descend to such silliness and impose it on the
people? Why cannot our weekly story be henceforth some great plan that is
being worked out, whose history will delight us? For instance, every
stage of the building of the Panama Canal was followed with the greatest
interest in the films. But there was not enough of it to keep the films
busy.

The great material projects are often easier to realize than the little
moral reforms. Beautiful architectural undertakings, while appearing to
be material, and succeeding by the laws of American enterprise, bring
with them the healing hand of beauty. Beauty is not directly pious, but
does more civilizing in its proper hour than many sermons or laws.

The world seems to be in the hands of adventurers. Why not this for the
adventure of the American architects? If something akin to this plan does
not come to pass through photoplay propaganda, it means there is no
American builder with the blood of Julius Caesar in his veins. If there is
the old brute lust for empire left in any builder, let him awake. The
world is before him.

As for the other Utopians, the economi