“NO bureaucrat talks of saving the taxpayers, and the reason is that the workers who provide the funds for government are not tax conscious. It takes time and thought to make a study of the cost of government. In America where commodities are sold freelv without ration tickets, the consumers may strike against high prices. In Britain the people have to take what they can get of the necessaries of life. But the Americans have not yet found out why prices are high and the purchasing power of the dollar is shrinking. It is now worth about 48¢. It is a baffling business for the rich and the poor, but there seems to be little hope that the taxpayers will set to work to learn for themselves why they are in distress.

“The modern man we hear so much about has no time to work these things out for himself. The movie, the radio, and television are on the way to destroy thought. Perhaps the real reason why the people of a hundred years ago were able to better themselves is because they were not pestered from morning till night with the distractions of the machine age. When the artisan in Oldham or in Fall River reached home for his dinner, he had a chance to think things over. He was not worried about the payment of the next installment on some gadget that did his thinking for him. He had advantages of meditation the modern man knows little or nothing about. Science was something for the intellectual, and he did not bother much about it. He never dreamed of letting broadcasters have a mortgage on his mind. As for motor cars, buses, or bicycles to give him a lift for a few miles, he would have scorned them. Perhaps he knew that walking was an aid to thinking, as poets and musicians discovered years ago.

“Before the gadget age, the average man used his eyes, and what he saw set his mind to work. His descendant, who travels in a fast-moving vehicle, has no chance to see what he saw. The scenery goes by so fast that he cannot get a proper view of anything of consequence, and this is a very serious matter. For observation is a necessary exercise for the eyes. There were few bespectacled people when men walked. Today nearly every other person over thirty must have sight aids, and the number of people whose ears are decorated with tone amplifiers is increasing steadily. John Hervey, the great racehorse expert, remarked that the gas-pushers are breeding a race that will not know how to walk.

“What, therefore, can be expected from a physically defective proletariat? And, yet, we are told that the health of the British and American people was never better. Upon what basis is such an assertion made? Merely that there have been fewer sick people. How comes it, then, that every hospital in the land is crying out for more funds and the State says that the health of the people is so serious that medicine must be nationalized?

“‘Thinking is a bore; the moron is a very happy person. I am one,’ said a lady who was entertaining the president, the dean, and two or three professors of a well-known college. There was no doubt about her being a moron, but she had to admit that she would like to know as much as her cook, who attended a night school twice a week. Thinking is in disrepute, and how the proletarians are going to save themselves from becoming chattel slaves of the State is a mighty problem.”

— Francis Neilson, The Makers Of War (1950), pp. 34-35.

Please follow and like us: