hinterland in the individual and of the collective mind in the race is
understood, the whole problem of the statesman and his attitude toward
politics gains a new significance, and becomes accessible to a new series
of solutions...."

Let no one suppose that the unwillingness to cultivate what Mr. Wells
calls the "mental hinterland" is a vice peculiar to the business man. The
colleges submit to it whenever they concentrate their attention on the
details of the student's vocation before they have built up some cultural
background. The whole drift towards industrial training in schools has
the germs of disaster within it--a preoccupation with the technique of a
career. I am not a lover of the "cultural" activities of our schools and
colleges, still less am I a lover of shallow specialists. The
unquestioned need for experts in politics is full of the very real danger
that detailed preparation may give us a bureaucracy--a government by men
divorced from human tradition. The churches submit to the demand for
immediacy with great alacrity. Look at the so-called "liberal" churches.
Reacting against an empty formalism they are tumbling over themselves to
prove how directly they touch daily life. You read glowing articles in
magazines about preachers who devote their time to housing reforms, milk
supplies, the purging of the civil service. If you lament the ugliness of
their churches, the poverty of the ritual, and the political absorption
of their sermons, you are told that the church must abandon forms and
serve the common life of men. There are many ways of serving everyday
needs,--turning churches into social reform organs and political rostra
is, it seems to me, an obvious but shallow way of performing that
service. When churches cease to paint the background of our lives, to
nourish a Weltanschaung, strengthen men's ultimate purposes and reaffirm
the deepest values of life, then churches have ceased to meet the needs
for which they exist. That "hinterland" affects daily life, and the
church which cannot get a leverage on it by any other method than
entering into immediate political controversy is simply a church that is
dead. It may be an admirable agent of reform, but it has ceased to be a
church.

A large wing of the Socialist Party is the slave of obvious success. It
boasts that it has ceased to be "visionary" and has become "practical."
Votes, winning campaigns, putting through reform measures seem a great
achieveme