But California can tell us stories that are grim children of the tales of the wild Ambrose Bierce.  Then there is the lovely unforgotten Nora May French and the austere Edward Rowland Sill.

Edison is the new Gutenberg.  He has invented the new printing.  The state that realizes this may lead the soul of America, day after to-morrow.

CHAPTER XVII

PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT

The moving picture goes almost as far as journalism into the social fabric in some ways, further in others.  Soon, no doubt, many a little town will have its photographic news-press.  We have already the weekly world-news films from the big centres.

With local journalism will come devices for advertising home enterprises.  Some staple products will be made attractive by having film-actors show their uses.  The motion pictures will be in the public schools to stay.  Text-books in geography, history, zoology, botany, physiology, and other sciences will be illustrated by standardized films.  Along with these changes, there will be available at certain centres collections of films equivalent to the Standard Dictionary and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

And sooner or later we will have a straight-out capture of a complete film expression by the serious forces of civilization.  The merely impudent motion picture will be relegated to the leisure hours with yellow journalism.  Photoplay libraries are inevitable, as active if not as multitudinous as the book-circulating 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.