The curse that withers the world, in our particular period and state of culture, is that ordinary people do not give what they used to give or create what they once created. They do nothing but receive; at the best they are critics, and at the worst very uncritical. The Wireless and the Cinema, the newspaper and the newsreel, a score of such enormous modern machines of publicity, pour down their throats, or into their ears and minds, a flood of suggestion in which they have no co-operation, which they do not criticise, and to which they cannot reply. The old output of popular opinion, which came from the talk in the tavern, and began even with the tales in the nursery, has been reversed and silenced; and Governments are ready to give anything and everything, if they can only be reassured with soothing certainly that the people will give nothing.

-September 8, 1934, Illustrated London News