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Joel Chandler Harris, Harry Stillwell Edwards, George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, James Lane Allen, and Mark Twain are Southern men in Mr. Griffith’s class.  I recommend their works to him as a better basis for future Southern scenarios.

The Birth of a Nation has been very properly denounced for its Simon Legree qualities by Francis Hackett, Jane Addams, and others.  But it is still true that it is a wonder in its Griffith sections.  In its handling of masses of men it further illustrates the principles that made notable the old one-reel Battle film described in the beginning of this chapter.  The Battle in the end is greater, because of its self-possession and concentration:  all packed into twenty minutes.

When, in The Birth of a Nation, Lincoln (impersonated by Joseph Henabery) goes down before the assassin, it is a master-scene.  He falls as the representative of the government and a thousand high and noble crowd aspirations.  The mimic audience in the restored Ford’s Theatre rises in panic.  This crowd is interpreted in especial for us by the two young people in the seats nearest, and the freezing horror of the treason sweeps from the Ford’s Theatre audience to the real audience beyond them.  The real crowd touched with terror beholds its natural face in the glass.

Later come the pictures of the rioting negroes in the streets of the Southern town, mobs splendidly handled, tossing wildly and rhythmically like the sea.  Then is delineated the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, of which we have already spoken.  For comment on the musical accompaniment to The Birth of a Nation, read the fourteenth chapter entitled “The Orchestra, Conversation and the Censorship.”

In the future development of motion pictures mob-movements of anger and joy will go through fanatical and provincial whirlwinds into great national movements of anger and joy.

A book by Gerald Stanley Lee that has a score of future scenarios in it, a book that might well be dipped into by the reader before he goes to such a play as The Italian or The Battle, is the work which bears the title of this chapter:  “Crowds.”

Mr. Lee is far from infallible in his remedies for factory and industrial relations.  But in sensitiveness to the flowing street of humanity he is indeed a man.  Listen to the names of some of the divisions of his book:  “Crowds and Machines; Letting the Crowds be Good; Letting the Crowds be Beautiful; Crowds and Heroes; Where are we Going?  The Crowd Scare; The Strike, an Invention for making Crowds Think; The Crowd’s Imagination about People; Speaking as One of the Crowd; Touching the Imagination of Crowds.”  Films in the spirit of these titles would help to make world-voters of us all.

The World State is indeed far away.  But as we peer into the Mirror Screen some of us dare to look forward to the time when the pouring streets of men will become sacred in each other’s eyes, in pictures and in fact.