Man’s past has never been better known than it is today. Yet this knowledge is almost exclusively academic. It is encased in the great libraries of the civilized world, and it exists divisively in the minds of countless scholars. But it is no longer known _as a whole_ that translates itself into the life of the community. In ceasing to be a tradition, the great story of the West has died; for the only existence the past can possibly have in a culture is traditional. A tradition is measured in a society by that society’s consciousness of its own _symbols_, which render the tradition present to men. Contemporary industrial society has burgeoned within what was once Christendom, but having lost the old Faith, it has lost the old symbols, which now hang on precariously as _myths_ and forms emptied of content. Industrial man has no tradition of his own to incarnate in song and stone, in the gestures of daily living. He has nothing to recall. As a result contemporary man is ruled largely by wayward myths that appeal to his subconscious drives. Political slogans, ideals gleaned from mass entertainment and ephemeral advertising dominate his urges, and create his conscious desires. Cinema heroes and contest winners give him an ever shifting hagiography in which nothing is so dead as yesterday’s idol or this morning’s news. Even the library that houses last week’s paper is called “the morgue.” A society without a self-conscious tradition takes to worshipping the future. It adores that which has not been, and that which never is. If Shaw was a satirical mirror of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, his friend Wells was its prophet. It is through Wells that the man of the twenty-fifth century came into his own. And Wells’ most articulate critic in those days, throughout the whole of England, was Hilaire Belloc. Today Belloc’s long battle against this drive away from our origins, his long fight to make the West conscious and proud of its past, has been partially vindicated, ironically enough, in our own generation. After World War II, with the threat of the atomic age, the prophets of the future have turned into prophets of doom. When thinking man looks ahead he does not see the age of superman, but the grim world of Big Brother and the phantasies of George Orwell. The future, if the present be not altered by a radical reaction, can only effect a “Servile State” which would be even more inhuman and barbarous than the coming society envisaged by Belloc when he first penned that now famous term in 1908.