“ TRAMWAY MINDS

Evening Star, Issue 22457, 30 September 1936, Page 12

“ TRAMWAY MINDS

** The trouble in the world to-day arises out of the fact that our minda run on tramlines.

“ Sometimes we complain about it. saying we 1 are getting into a groove,* which is only another way of saying that we are running along a tramline. But we never do much to vary op deflect our course,” says “ Plain Dealer,” in ‘Truth.’ “The city dweller knows the way from his home to his office. If. he lives in a suburb he also knows the line of railway or the bus route that connects the two. But he knows no more about the streets that lie off his main route, of the people who live in those streets, and of the lives they lead, although he passes them every day, than he knows about the highlands of Ethiopia. “ Life is short, and the world is . * wide one. We are most of us compelled by the limitations of time to restrict our activities along the tranu ways. The routine of modern existence has robbed us of the time to map out the routes of our own thought—perhaps the coming of new agencies like the cinema, which in its appeal t« the mass, inevitably moulds a mass mind. But whatever the cause of it, this process is disastrous. It make* us mannequins instead of men, and it makes it so much easier for the Mars* and Mussolinis to push us that on* logical step further into the slave state, where all tramlines are switched in the same direction, and it is beyond the wit of man to say what lie* at the end of them.”