But think of the dogged work, the complicated ingenuity, the
money and the personnel that were required. Nothing like that exists
in time of peace, and as a corollary there are whole sections, there
are vast groups, ghettoes, enclaves and classes that hear only vaguely
about much that is going on.
They live in grooves, are shut in among their own affairs, barred out
of larger affairs, meet few people not of their own sort, read little.
Travel and trade, the mails, the wires, and radio, railroads,
highways, ships, motor cars, and in the coming generation aeroplanes,
are, of course, of the utmost influence on the circulation of ideas.
Each of these affects the supply and the quality of information and
opinion in a most intricate way. Each is itself affected by technical,
by economic, by political conditions. Every time a government relaxes
the passport ceremonies or the customs inspection, every time a new
railway or a new port is opened, a new shipping line established,
every time rates go up or down, the mails move faster or more slowly,
the cables are uncensored and made less expensive, highways built, or
widened, or improved, the circulation of ideas is influenced. Tariff
schedules and subsidies affect the direction of commercial enterprise,
and therefore the nature of human contracts. And so it may well
happen, as it did for example in the case of Salem, Massachusetts,
that a change in the art of shipbuilding will reduce a whole city from
a center where international influences converge to a genteel
provincial town.
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