Modern Times was the last of the silent films by the great director and pantomime Charlie Chaplin. As the giant machinery of the industrial society that was coming to dominate the agricultural plains of America and the workshops of Europe begins to grind the hapless "little tramp." There are differences, of course. Chaplin's times, especially those of Modern Times in the midst of the Great Depression, rising nationalism, racism and ultimately war, were a particularly bleak period for the West. But if Chaplin's art can rise above it and make us laugh and hope, after all love and the "tramp's" sense of himself finally triumph over all his hardships, we should be able to do the same with our own modest, in comparison, tribulations.