TRAMWAY MINDS

Evening Star, Issue 22459, 2 October 1936, Page 10

TRAMWAY MINDS

“ The trouble in the world to-day .arises out of the fact that our minds run on tramlines. “ Sometimes we complain about it, saying wo 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 or 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 lie 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 a wide one. We are most of us compelled by the limitations of time to restrict our activities along the tramways. The routine of modern existence has robbed ns 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 to the mass, inevitably moulds a mass mind. But whatever the cause of it, this process is disastrous. It makes us mannequins instead of men, and it makes it so much easier for the Marsf. and Mussolini's to push us that one 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 lies at the end of them.”