The descendants of the Puritans and the Dutchmen, whose fathers rebelled against the censors of the James I era, dictating to them what creed and government they must accept, find it hard, after three hundred years of freedom of press and speech, to go back to the very thing from which their ancestors fled. Long ago the historians said that the American Republic was the vision of John Milton in his plea for the liberty of the printing-press, set up in code and constitution. The genius of our Republic is personal responsibility, individual excellence. A father and mother must rise up early and sit up late to teach their boy and girl to think for themselves, using their intellect; to weigh for themselves, using their judgment; to decide for themselves, using their own conscience and will.
“Hell is paved with good intentions.” The tragedy that we call human history is made more understandable by these depressing, revelatory words. The fussy, the futile, those whose hearts are kindly but whose brains are weak, whose motives are praiseworthy but whose methods are inept and inadequate, have, from the beginning of time, made life harder than it need be for their fellow-men. When these well-intentioned but badly-balanced busybodies combine with stronger characters whose motives are reprehensibly selfish to mould men in the mass to their own narrow pattern, denying to the individual that freedom of choice regarding his own affairs that is one of the essential bulwarks of Anglo-Saxon civilization, an internal menace has come to American institutions more threatening than any external peril now within our purview.
But censorship of the movies will be, in all probability, only a passing and more or less localized phase of our national tendency to indulge in mischievous experimental legislation. If not, however, if censorship should ever become both national and permanent, then would be sounded the doom of those emancipatory institutions which have made of our American experiment in self-government the one great hope, the one burning beacon-light, for an over-governed, over-burdened, over-censored world.
CHAPTER XVII
THE MOVIE AS A WORLD LANGUAGE
The Esperanto of the Tongue—Its Rapidly Increasing Vogue—All Countries Taking It Up—Its Inferiority to the Esperanto of the Eye—Together They May Save the World—“The Covered Wagon”—Its Success as a Picture—Rheims Cathedral and a Prairie Schooner Symbols of Man’s Balanced Fate—Will the Race Choose to Construct or to Destroy?
CHAPTER XVII
THE MOVIE AS A WORLD LANGUAGE
It would be inexpedient, I believe, for me to bring this inadequate, but, I hope, more or less illuminating, investigation of the origin, present status and future possibilities of the screen to an end without going more into detail regarding what I have called the Esperanto of the Eye. That many of the ills to which flesh is heir, especially those springing from misunderstandings between races and nations, might be avoided, in great part, at least, by means of a universal language is far from being a recent idea. Like most seemingly modern generalizations, such as the theory of evolution, the law of the conservation of energy, and other apparently recent forward steps, the possibility of a tongue that should be understood of all men had come within the purview of the Greek and Roman writers of the classic period. But the intervention of the so-called Dark Ages, delaying Man’s upward progress by a thousand years, extinguished many a light which “the glory that was Greece” had given to the world, and it was not until comparatively recent times that any effort of a practical and promising nature had been made to provide the race with a poultice for healing the blows inflicted upon it at the Tower of Babel.