CHAPTER XIII
THE MOVIE INTERPRETING THE PAST
Philip Kerr vs. H. G. Wells—Is the Race Doomed to Commit Hari-Kari?—The Failures of Diplomacy—The Screen Revealing Man to Himself—History the Best Bet of a Warworn Race—Teaching the Young Idea How Not to Shoot—Peace Via the Film.
CHAPTER XIII
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.