decades was deeply influenced by the columns of the illustrated magazines.  Those men who reached the millions by such articles cannot overlook the fact—­they may approve or condemn it—­that the masses of today prefer to be taught by pictures rather than by words.  The audiences are assembled anyhow.  Instead of feeding them with mere entertainment, why not give them food for serious thought?  It seemed therefore a most fertile idea when the “Paramount Pictograph” was founded to carry intellectual messages and ambitious discussions into the film houses.  Political and economic, social and hygienic, technical and industrial, esthetic and scientific questions can in no way be brought nearer to the grasp of millions.  The editors will have to take care that the discussions do not degenerate into one-sided propaganda, but so must the editors of a printed magazine.  Among the scientists the psychologist may have a particular interest in this latest venture of the film world.  The screen ought to offer a unique opportunity to interest wide circles in psychological experiments and mental tests and in this way to spread the knowledge of their importance for vocational guidance and the practical affairs of life.

Yet that power of the moving pictures to supplement the school room and the newspaper and the library by spreading information and knowledge is, after all, secondary to their general task, to bring entertainment and amusement to the masses.  This is the chief road on which the forward march of the last twenty years has been most rapid.  The theater and the vaudeville and the novel had to yield room and ample room to the play of the flitting pictures.  What was the real principle of the inner development on this artistic side?  The little scenes which the first pictures offered could hardly have been called plays.  They would have been unable to hold the attention by their own contents.  Their only charm was really the pleasure in the perfection with which the apparatus rendered the actual movements.  But soon touching episodes were staged, little humorous scenes or melodramatic actions were played before the camera, and the same emotions stirred which up to that time only the true theater play had awakened.  The aim seemed to be to have a real substitute for the stage.  The most evident gain of this new scheme was the reduction of expenses.  One actor is now able to entertain many thousand audiences at the same time, one stage setting is sufficient to give pleasure to millions.  The theater can thus be democratized.  Everybody’s purse allows him to see the greatest artists and in every village a stage can be set up and the joy of a true theater performance can be spread to the remotest corner of the lands.  Just as the graphophone can multiply without limit the music of the concert hall, the singer, and the orchestra, so, it seemed, would the photoplay reproduce the theater performance without end.