Read Ebook: That Marvel—The Movie A Glance at Its Past Its Promising Present and Its Significant Future by Van Zile Edward S Edward Sims Hays Will H Will Harrison Author Of Introduction Etc Pyle Howard Illustrator

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Belatedly, but with thrilling efficiency, the camera is giving to us and to our descendants pictures of savage and half-savage life against which the irresistible power of the regnant races of the earth has issued a decree of annihilation. The polar seas, the islands of the Pacific, the deserts, mountain-tops, jungles, are shown to us on the screen as they are to-day, as if this generation were frantically endeavoring to assure itself that this romantic planet of ours is not really doomed to become eventually as prosaic and uninteresting as Main Street.

The call of the wild and the rattle of a Ford car are strangely incongruous sounds, but they have been dramatically brought together of late. Adventurous dare-devils in various parts of the world are using the camera to rescue from oblivion the vanishing fauna of the outlands. The defiant jungle surrenders unconditionally to the tin Lizzie. I recently spent an enjoyable and enlightening evening watching H. A. Snow hunting big game in Africa with his gun and his photographic apparatus and repeatedly looking death in the face that posterity might possess a picture of the animal life under the equator that is destined presently to become obsolete. The lion, rhinoceros, elephant, giraffe, zebra, hippopotamus, wild buck, ostrich, baboon, camel, gnu were ours for a time to study at close range, revealed to us in their native habitat without the necessity upon our part of spending months in constant peril from heat, snakes, carnivora, fever, and other enemies which war against the white man in African wilds.

As I watched the screen that evening, my memory went back nearly half a century. It brought to my mind the picture of a boy curled up in a library chair and absorbed in the pages of Paul du Chaillu's book "Under the Equator," a book whose revelations of wild life in Africa subjected the author to a period during which he was suspected of being a Baron Munchausen, or, as we would say to-day, a Dr. Cook. There were skeptics who bluntly asserted that the French explorer had evolved the gorilla out of his own inner consciousness.

Eventually, of course, du Chaillu's veracity was established; but, victim as he was of the limitations of his generation, he could not at first furnish to the public convincing proof that his tales of adventure and discovery in the African jungle were founded upon fact. To-day the explorer, arctic or tropical, returns to civilization as to Missouri--prepared to show all scoffers that their incredulity is ridiculous. Defiantly he has turned a crank while sudden death from a polar bear or a jungle elephant is close at hand; and eventually the imminence of the peril, the suspense of a tragic moment, are within the power of the screen to transmit to wide-eyed audiences safely seated twenty thousand miles away from the scene of the thrilling episode!

As the camera is more thorough and convincing in its revelations of the drama of the jungle than is the pen so is it more extravagant in its use of the material that makes the wild life of the outlands interesting to the untravelled public. There may remain untamed animals in Africa that the Snows have not effectively screened, but a fair acquaintance with equatorial fauna leads me to the conclusion that the camera can afford now to rest upon its laurels in so far as the creatures of the jungle are concerned.

Omnivorous, insatiable, the screen is sending out its camera-men to all the corners of the known and the unknown earth, to the end that you and I may learn eventually every secret that our planet has hitherto concealed. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth--that's why Man, who has become a peripatetic photographer, is venturing to lands afar. And the public is glad to confer applause, and more material rewards, upon those who mirror for us some dramatic phase of life upon earth to-day especially if, as is the case with the big game of Africa, it bids fair to pass presently forever out of existence.

President Harding, whose present exalted position gives him unequalled facilities for observing the potential tendencies of the day, has become an enthusiastic believer in the uplifting possibilities that the screen has begun to manifest. Much of what we study in our youth, says the President, might be

made dramatically interesting if we could see it. Next in value to studying history by the procedure of living through its epochs, its eras and its periods, would be to see its actors and evolutions presented before our eyes. If we are to understand the present and attempt to conjecture the future, we need to know a good deal about the backgrounds of the past. The Europe of the later middle ages, of the period just before and at the beginning of the Renaissance, could be wonderfully portrayed in a series of pictures dramatizing "The Cloister and the Hearth." I do not know whether anybody reads "The Cloister and the Hearth" any more, but I am sure that one family with which I am pretty well acquainted would be glad to patronize a combination of picture serials and really intelligent talks with this story as the basis and with the purpose of giving a real conception and understanding of the Europe of that epoch.

Mr. Harding has grasped fully the significance of the motion picture in connection with the past, present, and future of the race. He has suggested the screening of Wells's "Outline of History" and of Van Loon's "Story of Mankind," and has called attention to the possibility that, under the direction of the Federal Bureau of Standards, films might be taken illustrating the fundamental principles of the science of geology. Realizing, as he does, that ignorance is the enemy democracy, in order to survive, must overcome, and that the surest safeguard to our institutions is enlightenment, President Harding has thrown himself wholeheartedly into that growing movement which is destined eventually, if Fate is kind to us, to make the motion picture worthy in its achievements of the splendid possibilities that are within its grasp.

"The universal appeal of pictures!" Mankind from the days when our ancestors sketched reindeer upon the walls of their caves has felt their appeal, but only recently has its universality become of crucial significance to the race. The printing-press, as we realized despairingly in 1914, has failed to save civilization from its recurrent attempts at suicide. Men read and talked, and, then, as had their illiterate progenitors, grasped their weapons and went to fighting. Neither from books nor from debates has mankind in the mass grasped that enlightenment which often comes to individuals but which is not sufficiently wide-spread and compelling to defend the race from constant reversions to brutish manifestations.

And now comes visualization--in movie theatres, in newspapers, in schools, colleges, churches--to mould, for good or evil, the plastic soul of Man. What will the harvest be? Who can say? Francis Bacon asserted that "reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man." Something more, as the centuries have proved, is necessary to make the human race what it should be. Is it not barely possible that some Bacon of the future will exultingly exclaim: "The screen maketh a civilized man!"?

THE MOVIE AND THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC RELATIONS

THE MOVIE AND THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC RELATIONS

the increased use of motion pictures as a force for good citizenship and a factor in social benefit; for the development of more intelligent co?peration between the public and the motion picture industry; to aid the co?perative movement instituted between the National Education Association and the motion picture producers for the making of pedagogic films and employing them effectively in schools; to encourage the effort to advance the usefulness of motion pictures as an instrument of international amity by correctly portraying American life, ideals and opportunities in pictures sent abroad and by properly depicting foreigners and foreign scenes in pictures presented here; to further, in general, all constructive methods for bringing about a sympathetic interest in the attainment and maintenance of high standards of art, entertainment, education and morals in motion pictures.

Not the least important of the appendices to be found at the end of this book is that which gives a list of the national organizations composing this Committee on Public Relations. It is in effect a record of a great mobilization of the uplifting agencies of the nation on the side of righteousness and progress in a struggle between good and evil for control of the newest and most powerful of the vehicles at man's disposal for influencing his fellowman. As has been demonstrated in another chapter, the screen has become the most effective and wide-reaching of all the media yet devised by human ingenuity for influencing the heart, mind and soul of the race. Realizing this, the organizations referred to above , representing more than half the entire population of the United States, have thrown the weight of their enormous influence upon the side of those builders of a better civilization who are striving to make the motion picture more worthy of the important place it has so recently assumed in the life of the world. Never before in the history of the race has such a unification of effort by the great altruistic organizations of a nation been made in times of peace, and for the purposes of peace, as that which was begun a year and a half ago by the Committee on Public Relations. What the screen could do to improve the social order was recognized at the very moment it was seen what the social order could do to improve the screen--and, lo, there came about an alliance that, to those who grasped its full significance, stood revealed as one of the greatest forward steps civilization has ever taken. The organized powers of uplift and enlightenment had seen that a new, untried, undisciplined force, pregnant of both good and evil, had come into the world and they had rallied to its assistance at the psychological moment, to the end that the future of the screen, and therefore of the human race itself, might present a more satisfactory aspect than it has hitherto exhibited.

Says Mr. Jason S. Joy, Executive Secretary of the Committee on Public Relations:

I am often asked the following three progressive questions--First, why are the organizations affiliated with the Committee on Public Relations interested in the motion picture? Second, why are they working with the motion picture people rather than against them? Third, why do they co?perate with the so-called "old-line" companies rather than exclusively with independent companies?

I am able to answer these questions to my own satisfaction. Admitting that motion pictures exercise a powerful influence for good or evil, it is to the selfish interests of these organizations to make motion pictures an influence for good. As to the second query, let me say that constructive co?peration is capable of greater results than destructive criticism, particularly when it is accompanied by a willingness to privately but fearlessly condemn evil practices when they are found to exist. It seems to me wholly foolish and futile to cry out against any practice unless at the same time you are able to suggest a solution or at least an attempt at a solution of the problem. I am convinced that one of the most harmful habits of our day is the one which has been adopted by certain amateur and professional reformers who with half truths loudly condemn the motion picture industry and everybody connected with it. My answer to the third query is this: The Committee on Public Relations is working with the so-called "old-line" companies because these companies have demonstrated their ability to make the kind of pictures the public has hitherto demanded and have, therefore, manifested their knowledge of the technique and business methods of making pictures; because, also, they have demonstrated and expressed their desire to attain the ends for which the Committee is working, and because they have asked the Committee to co?perate with them, and are co?perating with the Committee. Within parenthesis, let me say, that there pass by me at the cross-roads where I sit no end of Sir Galahads rushing forth to conquer the world. These persons are usually well-equipped with ideals and enthusiasm and often with money, but because they lack the technical ability which results from long experience they come back with little to show for their efforts except a trail of broken promises, unpaid debts, and lost ideals. Our best and only hope for the future lies with the well established companies who have proved their ability in their profession.

The human race moves forward and upward through the efforts of those who know how to perform the miracle of hitching their wagon to a star while, at the same time, they keep their feet upon the earth. Taking at random a few of the sixty organizations comprising the Committee on Public Relations we come upon such sharply contrasted bodies as the Society of Colonial Dames and the General Federation of Women's Clubs; the Academy of Political Science and the Salvation Army; the Girls Friendly Society and the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World; The National Council of Catholic Women and the Young Men's Hebrew Association; the American Federation of Labor and the Boy Scouts of America, etc. Now all these societies, fraternities, sororities, or whatsoever they may be, helping by their membership to make up the 60,000,000 Americans who have come officially to the support of the motion picture industry, have, each and every one of them, reached a position of power and success by wasting no time in endeavoring futilely to put salt on the tail of the millennium but by combining loyalty to high ideals with practical efficiency in dealing with this world as it manifests itself to the worker who dreams and the dreamer who works. In other words, our great altruistic organizations discovered at the outset of their respective careers that the ideal and the practical are necessary to each other but, to produce results, must plan how to make constant compromises with each other for the sake of actual progress.

The motion picture producers have gone through, as an organization, the same experience that has come to the Colonial Dames, the Salvation Army, the Boy Scouts, or any one of the organizations holding membership on the Committee of Public Relations. They have learned by experiment that progress is made possible only through a working adjustment between idealism and realism. If idealism is allowed to become rainbow-chasing, or realism to become revolting, the balance that assures a steady movement in the right direction is destroyed and disaster results. Every earthly institution that survives has been forced to fight its way to permanency against the disintegrating influence of its own extremists, its ultra-conservatives and ultra-radicals. In the long run, it is the middle of the road that leads nations and institutions into safe environments.

The great question at issue in connection with the motion picture industry, as it is with any given line of human endeavor, is this: Is its course upward or downward, will its future be free from the shortcomings of its past? Let me say here, very frankly, that had I not felt months ago that an affirmative answer to these queries was not merely justified but had been made imperative by facts and figures this book would never have been written. But as the work has progressed, and I have been obliged to look at the motion picture field through both a telescope and a microscope, I have been convinced by an overwhelming mass of evidence that the general trend of the newest of the arts is, in spite of all that I have said about its youthful indiscretions, in the right direction.

It can never attain perfection--nothing that is man-made can hope to do that. But the movie, whatever may be said against it by its detractors, is constantly making progress toward a commanding position where, it is conceivable, it may eventually confer upon mankind the inestimable boon of which the author, as stated in the first chapter of this book, has had the audacity to dream. And be it said just here that if the full dynamics of the screen as a world-civilizer are completely developed, eventually both producers and public will owe a great debt of gratitude to the Committee on Public Relations.

THE MOVIE AS A PEDAGOGUE

THE MOVIE AS A PEDAGOGUE

THE utilitarian evolution of the movie has been as remarkable as the recreational--though much less spectacular. The screen seems to have come like a poultice to heal the blows of ignorance, of worn-out methods in schools, hospitals and laboratories, and to act as a tonic upon all the movements and enterprises that make for the betterment of the race. Modern scientists, philanthropists, statesmen, educators, sociologists, uplifters of all kinds, may appropriately paraphrase Robert Burns by exclaiming "a screen's amang ye takin' notes."

Visual education--that is, intellectual stimulus through motion pictures--has made amazing progress in our schools and colleges during the past few years. It has been proved by statistics, based upon the results of examinations, that students instructed by screen-pictures obtain higher marks than those who have been seeking knowledge on a given subject only through text-books.

Evidence upon this point has become of late cumulative and conclusive. Data to show that the Esperanto of the Eye is a more efficient instructor than either the spoken or the printed word is ours in abundance, but only one or two striking proofs of the proposition will suffice for our present purposes. Two years ago Professor Joseph J. Weber, of the University of Kansas, conducted a series of enlightening tests in Public School No. 62, New York City, with the following results:

At about the same time, Professor J. W. Sheppard, of the University of Oklahoma, made an experiment in visual education at a high-school in Madison, Wis. Abstract and concrete subjects were taught to a group of pupils of ordinary intelligence by means of the films only, to a second group by a superior instructor only, and to a third group by an average instructor only. In a searching examination subsequently the pupils taught by the films scored an average of 74.5, those taught by the superior instructor an average of 66.9, and those by the inferior instructor an average of 61.3. In this game of twenty questions the screen had won the pot by a safe margin.

The significance of the above is revealed in its entirety when we realize that even the movie as a purveyor of amusement has not wholly neglected its obligations as a pedagogue. The millions of Americans who daily watch the screen in quest of recreation are, willy nilly, obliged to absorb something in the way of added knowledge. Geography, history--both ancient and contemporary,--botany, astronomy, physics, ethnology, archaeology and other educational sources are tapped, even in the least pretentious movie theatres, to stir the imaginations and enlarge the general knowledge of their patrons. It is safe to say that the American people, even though our schools and colleges had not welcomed the film as an aid to education, would have vastly increased their information regarding our planet and the history and achievements of the human race merely through the homage that the amusement screen has paid, perforce, to erudition.

But what the recreational screen has done casually and inadequately for the dissemination of general knowledge, is, of course, negligible compared with the influence that has been exerted by the educational films whose use in the class-rooms of our schools and colleges has been for some years past constantly on the increase. The growing importance of the film as an adjunct to instruction is shown by the fact that its progress has not been left to chance, as was the evolution of the recreational movie. The realm of visual education has been taken over by men and organizations whose qualifications for the task they have assumed assure to the screen in the class-room a great and splendid future. Concerning this matter, Will H. Hays recently said:

The Society of Visual Education contains thirteen presidents of colleges, six of normal schools, three representatives of large foundations, seventy-six professors and instructors in colleges and universities, nine state superintendents of public instruction and seventy-one city superintendents of schools. There are other groups of educators in the motion picture field--notably the National Academy of Visual Instruction and the Visual Instruction Association of America. An incomplete list shows twenty-eight colleges and universities which have organized departments for the distribution of films. At least seventeen of our largest educational institutions are giving courses to their students on the use of the motion picture for visual instruction. Columbia has courses which teach photoplay writing and the mechanics of production. The University of Nebraska has erected a film studio on its campus, and the Universities of Yale, Chicago, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, Illinois and Utah have started the production of their own motion pictures.

Let us confine ourselves for the moment to what the educational films are doing in the realm of history, leaving their achievements as pictorial aids to the study of astronomy, physics, ethnology, palaeeontology, geology, and other sciences, for later consideration. If the Esperanto of the Eye is to be instrumental in giving to this and coming generations an accurate picture of our race's past, it is essential that our films dealing with history should be accurate in detail. A falsehood exploited by the screen can do more damage than a misrepresentation imbedded in a text-book. It is encouraging, therefore, to those of us who believe that educational films are destined eventually to exercise an influence for good upon mankind that may save it from a return to barbarism to realize that the screen as an adjunct to the teaching of history is receiving valuable assistance from our most eminent professors in this field of study.

There is much data at our disposal to prove that the Olympian heights of erudition are deeply impressed by the obligations which the enlightened gods owe to films fashioned to instruct lesser and more ignorant mortals. It will suffice for our present purpose, however, to prove the existence of a general and praiseworthy trend in visual instruction by giving, in some detail, an account of an enterprise, sponsored by the Department of History of Yale University, that is of importance in itself, but, more than that, significant in the promise it gives of a splendid future for the educational film.

History was rewritten here to-day, shorn of its romance and amplified by facts, by the Yale University Press. To do this, mediaeval sailors, dressed in gayly colored tights and jerkins, with huge knives in their belts, clambered through the rigging of the Santa Maria off Jackson Park, and Christopher Columbus leaned over the rail, crucifix in hand, and gazed at the receding shores, while two camera men kept grinding away at their machines. All this was done that the popular idea of history might be revised and the school children of America might have accurate information, uncontaminated by the legends and myths which have grown around the discovery of America during the last 400 years.... The Yale University Press is making a series of historical pictures for school use which the History Department of the University asserts will be as accurate as research and study can make them. On board the Santa Maria there were mutinies and troublesome times. Martin Alonzo Pinzon, a Spanish gentleman who owned the Santa Maria, commanded the Pinta, and furnished the cash for the expedition. Much more is made of Pinzon in the film than of Queen Isabella, the Professors of History at Yale being inclined to doubt the legend that Her Majesty ever patronized a pawn-shop to give assistance to the dare-deviltry of Columbus.

Never before, in the history of the race, has mankind taken so deep and wide-spread an interest in the past of mankind as it exhibits to-day. There appears to be a world-wide feeling that, unless the race can learn the lessons that the great catastrophes that have repeatedly overtaken civilization teach, the outlook for the future is appallingly dark. On New Year's Day, 1923, a body of prominent American educators issued an appeal to the public in which the following striking sentences occur:

The present situation in international affairs, involving as it does the imminent peril of war, must give concern to every thoughtful observer. After a devastating conflict which has cost millions of lives, created immeasurable hatred and piled up a debt of for every minute of time since Christ was born, the nations of the earth, apparently having learned nothing and forgotten nothing, are once more playing the old game of competitive imperialism and competitive armament.

The above, startling but unanswerable as it is, has a direct bearing upon the subject we have just had under discussion, namely, the teaching of history through visual instruction. The advantages of this method for schools and colleges, conclusively proven though it has been, will be of no permanent and uplifting value to coming generations unless the screen as a pedagogue finds a way to give to a race that is constantly repeating old and fatal errors a message and a warning that shall influence the young men and women who are to mould the world's future to avoid the disastrous errors of their progenitors. From this point of view it becomes apparent that to those into whose hands has been placed the dissemination of educational films has been vouchsafed a great opportunity to benefit a race that is in sore need of guidance, of some impetus that shall make its future less deplorable than its blood-stained past.

THE MOVIE INTERPRETING THE PAST

THE MOVIE INTERPRETING THE PAST

WHETHER the first antidote the race has discovered against polyglot poison can save civilization before it is blown to pieces by high explosive shells is a problem that assumes new significance daily, as diplomacy continues to commit, in its blind and fatuous egotism, its historic blunders. The head-lines in the newspapers furnish a sad commentary upon the present status of the collective wisdom of mankind. The average intelligence of the race as it is manifested in international affairs is below the standard set by a day-nursery, where a singed child, it is confidently assumed, will avoid the fire. The high cost of war in life and treasure has been demonstrated to the race in recent years by a world-wide conflict that threatened the very foundations of civilization with destruction. Did mankind learn the lesson taught by this titanic struggle? If it did not, if it continues to provide itself with new and deadlier weapons for the waging of unimaginably awful combats, what can be done at the last moment, as this may prove to be, to save civilization from ruin as it totters upon the very edge of a fatal precipice?

The tragic importance of this query may seem, at first sight, to throw into comparative insignificance the topic we have under discussion, namely, the teaching of history in our schools and colleges through visual instruction. But our pointed question and our general theme are, as will presently appear, closely related to one another.

Philip Kerr, for five years confidential adviser and secretary to Lloyd George, is among those who hold that we who indulge the hope that the screen may eventually act as a poultice to heal the blows delivered by diplomacy against the peace of the world are but chasing another rainbow that has at its end not a pot of ointment but a gigantic pile of dynamite. At Williamstown, Mass., last summer, Mr. Kerr said, to an audience of scholars and statesmen of international prominence:

If we look back through history we shall see that what has happened in the last eight years is not a unique nor isolated phenomenon. For example, there was a world war for the first fifteen years of the last century, ending with the battle of Waterloo. We can trace back through the ages an ever-recurring procession of devastating wars engulfing the whole of the civilized world, followed by peaces of exhaustion, which in turn gave way to new eras of war. The question I have been asking myself for the last two or three years has been this: Have we as the result of the terrible experiences of the late war, and of the victory of the Allies, any real security against a repetition of a world war. To this question I have to answer, No.

To this deplorable and hopeless conclusion Mr. Kerr comes because he finds that mankind does its thinking not in terms of humanity, but of states; that the world, in so far as international problems are concerned, is as parochial as it was a generation or a century ago. "Life," remarked a flippant pessimist, "is just one damned thing after another." To Mr. Kerr's despondent eyes history seems to be just one devastating war after another, with no end to the infernal succession now in sight. But is it not barely possible that history, gaining from the screen a new method of exposition, a new way of approach to the soul of Man, may eventually convince the human race that there is a more sensible solution to international problems than through bloodshed?

It is through the study of history alone that Man can, in the opinion of H. G. Wells, find his way toward higher planes of existence out of the mire in which he is now stuck. In his book "The Undying Fire," Wells, speaking through the hero of his story, says, in explanation of his plan for the improvement of society:

Philip Kerr and H. G. Wells examining, as they do, the same historical data, shocked, as they both are, by mankind's constant repetition of ancient and easily avoidable errors, reach, from the same premises, diametrically opposite conclusions. Kerr denies that our race can obtain from a study of its past any hope for its future. Wells, on the other hand, holds that history can be made the handmaiden of progress and that those who teach it can become, if they are worthy of their sacred mission, the saviors of an imperilled race.

At the present moment, of course, it is impossible to determine whether the pessimism of Kerr or the optimism of Wells is entitled to the verdict of the court. The evidence is not all in, and, from present appearances, the case seems destined to a long and tedious life, going down on appeal, as it must, from one generation to another. But would it not be a hopelessly mad world which, on the issue involved in this contention, backed Kerr against Wells? Imagine the race abandoning itself to despair, admitting that it can find within itself no safeguard against its impending doom of hari-kari, turning heart-sick and hopeless from futile peace-conferences and gazing in sullen silence at the mobilization of new armies under old catch-words in various parts of a blood-soaked planet! Even if Wells shall prove to be in the end a dreamer of dreams and chaser of rainbows, defeated in his effort to put salt on the tail of the millennium, is it not more reasonable to take a gambling chance on his possible victory as an idealist than to give abject surrender with Kerr to the evil influences that for countless ages have made of our planet a recurrent shambles?

Common-sense, then, forces us to the conclusion that, in the perturbed world in which we at present find ourselves there is no feature of our complicated modern life more entitled to earnest consideration than the screen as historian. In schools, colleges and movie theatres, with films depicting significant episodes in Man's past or illuminating events of to-day, a mirror is vouchsafed to this generation in which it can see both itself and its progenitors in a light that now for the first time clarifies our sight. The regeneration of the individual through religious influences is effected in large part by means of a self-revelation that begets repentance and reform. To employ a bit of slang to illustrate the point, all sinners come from Missouri and refuse to be rescued blindly. They must be shown. The wicked, war-soiled, wantonly selfish nations of the world have never had, so far as the masses of the people are concerned, the truths of history visualized to their startled eyes. Is it not possible that when the errors, the tragedies, the cumulative horrors of the past are revealed to them, when the majority of men and women turn to the evidence of their senses rather than to gossip, rumor and hearsay for historical enlightenment, Mankind, horrified at his scowling face and bloody hands, as he sees them for the first time in a mirror, will take an oath to remove the brand of Cain from his brow, the blush from his cheeks as the screen shows him what man's inhumanity to man really means?

The late Viscount Bryce, just before his regrettable death, delivered eight lectures in the United States on "the large subject covered by the term International Relations." "It is History," says Bryce, "which, recording the events and explaining the influences that have moulded the minds of men, shows us how the world of international politics has come to be what it is. History is the best--indeed the only--guide to a comprehension of the facts as they stand, and to a sound judgment of the various means that have been suggested for replacing suspicions and enmities by the co-operation of States in many things and by their good will in all." But Bryce, than whom no publicist of our times has held higher place as a seer and prophet, speaks not in an optimistic vein in his last published utterances.

The great lesson of the war, that the ambitions and hatreds which cause war must be removed, has not been learned, and if this war has failed to impress the lesson upon most of the peoples, what else can teach them? This is why thoughtful men are despondent, and why some comfort must now be sought for, some remedy devised at once against a recurrence of the calamities we have suffered.

Bryce is in agreement with the leading minds of to-day striving for a solution of international problems. They see no way out of the difficulties and perils confronting the race unless some new and hitherto unknown method be found to prevent mankind from repeating the scarlet sins that have disgraced and incarnadined the past. Arbitration, conciliation, alliances, treaties, congresses, leagues, peace palaces and palaver--what have they accomplished that can be cited to confute the pessimism of Philip Kerr or to suggest the remedy the necessity for which James Bryce, with the clairvoyance of a dying man, acutely realized? What the race needs at this critical hour is both a message and a medium, a warning and a way, a revelation and a road, with a light from the past shining on the pathway just ahead.

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