"Experience soon showed that a few generations of lax and unscrupulous intellectual discipline had also sufficed to inflict serious harm on practical life. Competence and responsibility had grown increasingly rare in all the higher professions, including even those concerned with technology. To remedy this, supervision of the things of the mind among the people and in government came to be consigned more and more to the “intellectuals” in the best sense of the word. ... Although public opinion occasionally decries the strictness and the reputed arrogance of this caste, and although individuals have occasionally revolted against it, this leadership stands unshaken. Its integrity, its renunciation of all benefits and advantages other then intellectual ones, maintains and protects it. But it is also supported by what has long since become common knowledge, or at least a universal sense, that the continuance of civilization depends on this strict schooling. People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of the mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer’s slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue. It took long enough in all conscience for realization to come that the externals of civilization—technology, industry, commerce, and so on—also require common basis of intellectual honesty and morality."