Human Nature in Politics Part 4

When he goes deeper and asks for what purpose the Empire exists, he is apt to be told that the inhabitants of Great Britain conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind and have not yet had time to think out an _ex post facto_ justification for so doing. The only product of memory or reflection that can stir in him the emotion of patriotism is the statement that so far the tradition of the Empire has been to encourage and trust to political freedom. But political freedom, even in its n.o.blest form, is a negative quality, and the word is apt to bear different meanings in Bengal and Rhodesia and Australia.

States, however, const.i.tute only one among many types of political ent.i.ties. As soon as any body of men have been grouped under a common political name, that name may acquire emotional a.s.sociations as well as an intellectually a.n.a.lysable meaning. For the convenience, for instance, of local government the suburbs of Birmingham are divided into separate boroughs. Partly because these boroughs occupy the site of ancient villages, partly because football teams of Scotch professionals are named after them, partly because human emotions must have something to attach themselves to, they are said to be developing a fierce local patriotism, and West Bromwich is said to hate Aston as the Blues hated the Greens in the Byzantine theatre. In London, largely under the influence of the Birmingham instance, twenty-nine new boroughs were created in 1899, with names--at least in the case of the City of Westminster--deliberately selected in order to revive half-forgotten emotional a.s.sociations. However, in spite of Mr. Chesterton's prophecy in _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_, very few Londoners have learnt to feel or think primarily as citizens of their boroughs. Town Halls are built which they never see, coats of arms are invented which they would not recognise; and their boroughs are mere electoral wards in which they vote for a list of unknown names grouped under the general t.i.tle adopted by their political party.

The party is, in fact, the most effective political ent.i.ty in the modern national State. It has come into existence with the appearance of representative government on a large scale; its development has been unhampered by legal or const.i.tutional traditions, and it represents the most vigorous attempt which has been made to adapt the form of our political inst.i.tutions to the actual facts of human nature. In a modern State there may be ten million or more voters. Every one of them has an equal right to come forward as a candidate and to urge either as candidate or agitator the particular views which he may hold on any possible political question. But to each citizen, living as he does in the infinite stream of things, only a few of his ten million fellow-citizens could exist as separate objects of political thought or feeling, even if each one of them held only one opinion on one subject without change during his life. Something is required simpler and more permanent, something which can be loved and trusted, and which can be recognised at successive elections as being the same thing that was loved and trusted before; and a party is such a thing.

The origin of any particular party may be due to a deliberate intellectual process. It may be formed, as Burke said, by 'a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.'[17] But when a party has once come into existence its fortunes depend upon facts of human nature of which deliberate thought is only one. It is primarily a name, which, like other names, calls up when it is heard or seen an 'image' that shades imperceptibly into the voluntary realisation of its meaning. As in other cases, emotional reactions can be set up by the name and its automatic mental a.s.sociations. It is the business of the party managers to secure that these automatic a.s.sociations shall be as clear as possible, shall be shared by as large a number as possible, and shall call up as many and as strong emotions as possible. For this purpose nothing is more generally useful than the party colour. Our distant ancestors must have been able to recognise colour before they recognised language, and the simple and stronger emotions more easily attach themselves to a colour than to a word. The poor boy who died the other day with the ribbon of the Sheffield Wednesday Football Club on his pillow loved the colour itself with a direct and intimate affection.

[17] _Thoughts on the Present Discontents_ (Macmillan, 1902), p. 81.

A party tune is equally automatic in its action, and, in the case of people with a musical 'ear,' even more effective than a party colour as an object of emotion. As long as the Ma.r.s.eillaise, which is now the national tune of France, was the party tune of the revolution its influence was enormous. Even now, outside of France, it is a very valuable party a.s.set. It was a wise suggestion which an experienced political organiser made in the _Westminster Gazette_ at the time of Gladstone's death, that part of the money collected in his honour should be spent in paying for the composition of the best possible marching tune, which should be identified for all time with the Liberal Party.[18]

One of the few mistakes made by the very able men who organised Mr.

Chamberlain's Tariff Reform Campaign was their failure to secure even a tolerably good tune.

[18] _Westminster Gazette_, June 11, 1898.

Only less automatic than those of colour or tune come the emotional a.s.sociations called up by the first and simplest meaning of the word or words used for the party name. A Greek father called his baby 'Very Glorious' or 'Good in Counsel,' and the makers of parties in the same way choose names whose primary meanings possess established emotional a.s.sociations. From the beginning of the existence and activity of a party new a.s.sociations are, however, being created which tend to take the place, in a.s.sociation, of the original meaning of the name. No one in America when he uses the terms Republican or Democrat thinks of their dictionary meanings. Any one, indeed, who did so would have acquired a mental habit as useless and as annoying as the habit of reading Greek history with a perpetual recognition of the dictionary meanings of names like Aristobulus and Theocritus. Long and precise names which make definite a.s.sertions as to party policy are therefore soon shortened into meaningless syllables with new a.s.sociations derived from the actual history of the party. The Const.i.tutional Democrats in Russia become Cadets, and the Independent Labour Party becomes the I.L.P. On the other hand, the less conscious emotional a.s.sociations which are automatically excited by less precise political names may last much longer. The German National Liberals were valuable allies for Bismarck during a whole generation because their name vaguely suggested a combination of patriotism and freedom. When the mine-owners in the Transvaal decided some years ago to form a political party they chose, probably after considerable discussion, the name of 'Progressive.' It was an excellent choice. In South Africa the original a.s.sociations of the word were apparently soon superseded, but elsewhere it long suggested that Sir Percy Fitzpatrick and his party had the same sort of democratic sympathies as Mr. M'Kinnon Wood and his followers on the London County Council. No one speaking to an audience whose critical and logical faculties were fully aroused would indeed contend that because a certain body of people had chosen to call themselves Progressives, therefore a vote against them was necessarily a vote against progress. But in the dim and shadowy region of emotional a.s.sociation a good name, if its a.s.sociations are sufficiently subconscious, has a real political value.

Conversely, the opponents of a party attempt to label it with a name that will excite feelings of opposition. The old party terms of Whig and Tory are striking instances of such names given by opponents and lasting perhaps half a century before they lost their original abusive a.s.sociations. More modern attempts have been less successful, because they have been more precise. 'Jingo' had some of the vague suggestiveness of an effectively bad name, but 'Separatist,' 'Little Englander,' 'Food Taxer,' remain as a.s.sertions to be consciously accepted or rejected.

The whole relation between party ent.i.ties and political impulse can perhaps be best ill.u.s.trated from the art of advertis.e.m.e.nt. In advertis.e.m.e.nt the intellectual process can be watched apart from its ethical implications, and advertis.e.m.e.nt and party politics are becoming more and more closely a.s.similated in method. The political poster is placed side by side with the trade or theatrical poster on the h.o.a.rdings, it is drawn by the same artist and follows the same empirical rules of art. Let us suppose therefore that a financier thinks that there is an opening for a large advertising campaign in connection, say, with the tea trade. The actual tea-leaves in the world are as varied and unstable as the actual political opinions of mankind. Every leaf in every tea-garden is different from every other leaf, and a week of damp weather may change the whole stock in any warehouse. What therefore should the advertiser do to create a commercial 'ent.i.ty,' a 'tea' which men can think and feel about? A hundred years ago he would have made a number of optimistic and detailed statements with regard to his opportunities and methods of trade. He would have printed in the newspapers a statement that 'William Jones, a.s.sisted by a staff of experienced buyers, will attend the tea-sales of the East India Company, and will lay in parcels from the best Chinese Gardens, which he will retail to his customers at a profit of not more than five per centum.'

This, however, is an open appeal to the critical intellect, and by the critical intellect it would now be judged. We should not consider Mr.

Jones to be an unbia.s.sed witness as to the excellence of his choice, or think that he would have sufficient motive to adhere to his pledge about his rate of profit if he thought he could get more.

Nowadays, therefore, such an advertiser would practice on our automatic and subconscious a.s.sociations. He would choose some term, say 'Parramatta Tea,' which would produce in most men a vague suggestion of the tropical East, combined with the subconscious memory of a geography lesson on Australia. He would then proceed to create in connection with the word an automatic picture-image having previous emotional a.s.sociations of its own. By the time that a hundred thousand pounds had been cleverly spent, no one in England would be able to see the word 'Parramatta' on a parcel without a vague impulse to buy, founded on a day-dream recollection of his grandmother, or of the British fleet, or of a pretty young English matron, or of any other subject that the advertiser had chosen for its a.s.sociation with the emotions of trust or affection. When music plays a larger part in English public education it may be possible to use it effectively for advertis.e.m.e.nt, and a 'Parramatta Motif' would in that case appear in all the pantomimes, in connection, say, with a song about the Soldier's Return, and would be squeaked by a gramophone in every grocer's shop.

This instance has the immense advantage, as an aid to clearness of thought, that up to this point no Parramatta Tea exists, and no one has even settled what sort of tea shall be provided under that name.

Parramatta tea is still a commercial ent.i.ty pure and simple. It may later on be decided to sell very poor tea at a large profit until the original a.s.sociations of the name have been gradually superseded by the a.s.sociation of disappointment. Or it may be decided to experiment by selling different teas under that name in different places, and to push the sale of the flavour which 'takes on.' But there are other attractive names of teas on the h.o.a.rdings, with a.s.sociations of babies, and bull-dogs, and the Tower of London. If it is desired to develop a permanent trade in compet.i.tion with these it will probably be found wisest to supply tea of a fairly uniform quality, and with a distinctive flavour which may act as its 'meaning.' The great difficulty will then come when there is a change of public taste, and when the sales fall off because the chosen flavour no longer pleases. The directors may think it safest to go on selling the old flavour to a diminis.h.i.+ng number of customers, or they may gradually subst.i.tute another flavour, taking the risk that the number of housewives who say, 'This is not the real Parramatta Tea,' may be balanced by the number of those who say, 'Parramatta Tea has improved.' If people will not buy the old flavour at all, and prefer to buy the new flavour under a new name, the Parramatta Tea Company must be content to disappear, like a religion which has made an unsuccessful attempt to put new wine into old bottles.

All these conditions are as familiar to the party politician as they are to the advertiser. The party candidate is, at his first appearance, to most of his const.i.tuents merely a packet with the name of Liberal or Conservative upon it. That name has a.s.sociations of colour and music, of traditional habit and affection, which, when once formed, exist independently of the party policy. Unless he bears the party label--unless he is, as the Americans say, a 'regular' candidate--not only will those habits and affections be cut off from him, but he will find it extraordinarily difficult to present himself as a tangible ent.i.ty to the electors at all. A proportion of the electors, varying greatly at different times and at different places, will vote for the 'regular' nominee of their party without reference to his programme, though to the rest of them, and always to the nominating committee, he must also present a programme which can be identified with the party policy. But, in any case, as long as he is a party candidate, he must remember that it is in that character that he speaks and acts. The party prepossessions and party expectations of his const.i.tuents alone make it possible for them to think and feel with him. When he speaks there is between him and his audience the party mask, larger and less mobile than his own face, like the mask which enabled actors to be seen and heard in the vast open-air theatres of Greece. If he can no longer act the part with sincerity he must either leave the stage or present himself in the mask of another party.

Party leaders again have always to remember that the organisation which they control is an ent.i.ty with an existence in the memory and emotions of the electors, independent of their own opinions and actions. This does not mean that party leaders cannot be sincere. As individuals they can indeed only preserve their political life by being in constant readiness to lose it. Sometimes they must even risk the existence of their party itself. When Sir Robert Peel was converted to Free Trade in 1845, he had to decide whether he and his friends should shatter the Tory Party by leaving it, or should so transform its policy that it might not be recognised, even in the half-conscious logic of habit and a.s.sociation, as that ent.i.ty for which men had voted and worked four years before. In either case Peel was doing something other and more serious than the expression of his individual opinion on a question of the moment. And yet, if, recognising this, he had gone on advocating corn duties for the sake of his party, his whole personal force as a politician, and therefore even his party value, would have been lost.

If a celestial intelligence were now to look down from heaven on the earth with the power of observing every fact about all human beings at once, he might ask, as the newspaper editors are asking as I write, what that Socialism is which influences so many lives? He might answer himself with a definition which could be clumsily translated as 'a movement towards greater social equality, depending for its force upon three main factors, the growing political power of the working cla.s.ses, the growing social sympathy of many members of all cla.s.ses, and the belief, based on the growing authority of scientific method, that social arrangements can be transformed by means of conscious and deliberate contrivance.' He would see men trying to forward this movement by proposals as to taxation, wages, and regulative or collective administration; some of which proposals would prove to be successfully adapted to the facts of human existence and some would in the end be abandoned, either because no nation could be persuaded to try them or because when tried they failed. But he would also see that this definition of a many-sided and ever-varying movement drawn by abstraction from innumerable socialistic proposals and desires is not a description of 'Socialism' as it exists for the greater number of its supporters. The need of something which one may love and for which one may work has created for thousands of working men a personified 'Socialism,' a winged G.o.ddess with stern eyes and drawn sword to be the hope of the world and the protector of those that suffer. The need of some engine of thought which one may use with absolute faith and certainty has also created another Socialism, not a personification, but a final and authoritative creed. Such a creed appeared in England in 1884, and William Morris took it down in his beautiful handwriting from Mr. Hyndman's lectures. It was the revelation which made a little dimly educated working man say to me three years later, with tears of genuine humility in his eyes, 'How strange it is that this glorious truth has been hidden from all the clever and learned men of the world and shown to me.'

Meanwhile Socialism is always a word, a symbol used in common speech and writing. A hundred years hence it may have gone the way of its predecessors--Leveller, Saint-Simonism, Communism, Chartism--and may survive only in histories of a movement which has since undergone other transformations and borne other names. It may, on the other hand, remain, as the Republic has remained in France, to be the t.i.tle on coins and public buildings of a movement which after many disappointments and disillusionments has succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng itself as a government.

But the use of a word in common speech is only the resultant of its use by individual men and women, and particularly by those who accept it as a party name. Each one of them, as long as the movement is really alive, will find that while the word must be used, because otherwise the movement will have no political existence, yet its use creates a constant series of difficult problems in conduct. Any one who applies the name to himself or others in a sense so markedly different from common use as to make it certain or probable that he is creating a false impression is rightly charged with want of ordinary veracity. And yet there are cases where enormous practical results may depend upon keeping wide the use of a word which is tending to be narrowed. The 'Modernist'

Roman Catholic who has studied the history of religion uses the term 'Catholic Church' to mean a society which has gone through various intellectual stages in the past, and which depends for its vitality upon the existence of reasonable freedom of change in the future. He therefore calls himself a Catholic. To the Pope and his advisers, on the other hand, the Church is an unchanging miracle based on an unchanging revelation. Father Tyrrell, when he says that he 'believes' in the Catholic Church, though he obviously disbelieves in the actual occurrence of most of the facts which const.i.tute the original revelation, seems to them to be simply a liar, who is stealing their name for his own fraudulent purposes. They can no more understand him than can the Ultramontanes among the German Social-Democrats understand Bernstein and his Modernist allies. Bernstein himself, on the other hand, has to choose whether he ought to try to keep open the common use of the name Socialist, or whether in the end he will have to abandon it, because his claim to use it merely creates bad feeling and confusion of thought.

Sometimes a man of exceptional personal force and power of expression is, so to speak, a party--a political ent.i.ty--in himself. He may fas.h.i.+on a permanent and recognisable mask for himself as 'Honest John' or 'The Grand Old Man.' But this can as a rule only be done by those who learn the main condition of their task, the fact that if an individual statesman's intellectual career is to exist for the ma.s.s of the present public at all, it must be based either on an obstinate adherence to unchanging opinions or on a development, slow, simple, and consistent.

The indifferent and half attentive mind which most men turn towards politics is like a very slow photograph plate. He who wishes to be clearly photographed must stand before it in the same att.i.tude for a long time. A bird that flies across the plate leaves no mark.

'Change of opinion,' wrote Gladstone in 1868, 'in those to whose judgment the public looks more or less to a.s.sist its own, is an evil to the country, although a much smaller evil than their persistence in a course which they know to be wrong. It is not always to be blamed. But it is always to be watched with vigilance; always to be challenged and put upon its trial.'[19] Most statesmen avoid this choice between the loss of force resulting from a public change of opinion, and the loss of character resulting from the public persistence in an opinion privately abandoned, not only by considering carefully every change in their own conclusions, but by a delay, which often seems cowardly and absurd, in the public expression of their thoughts upon all questions except those which are ripe for immediate action. The written or reported word remains, and becomes part of that ent.i.ty outside himself which the stateman is always building or destroying or transforming.

[19] _Gleanings_, vol. vii. p. 100, quoted in Morley's _Life_, vol. i.

p. 211.

The same conditions affect other political ent.i.ties besides parties and statesmen. If a newspaper is to live as a political force it must impress itself on men's minds as holding day by day to a consistent view. The writers, not only from editorial discipline, but from the instinctive desire to be understood, write in the character of their paper's personality. If it is sold to a proprietor holding or wis.h.i.+ng to advocate different opinions, it must either frankly proclaim itself as a new thing or must make it appear by slow and solemn argumentative steps that the new att.i.tude is a necessary development of the old. It is therefore rightly felt that a capitalist who buys a paper for the sake of using its old influence to strengthen a new movement is doing something to be judged by other moral standards than those which apply to the purchase of so much printing-machinery and paper. He may be destroying something which has been a stable and intelligible ent.i.ty for thousands of plain people living in an otherwise unintelligible world, and which has collected round it affection and trust as real as was ever inspired by an orator or a monarch.

CHAPTER III

NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE IN POLITICS

The a.s.sumption--which is so closely interwoven with our habits of political and economic thought--that men always act on a reasoned opinion as to their interests, may be divided into two separate a.s.sumptions: first, that men always act on some kind of inference as to the best means of reaching a preconceived end, and secondly, that all inferences are of the same kind, and are produced by a uniform process of 'reasoning.'

In the two preceding chapters I dealt with the first a.s.sumption, and attempted to show that it is important for a politician to realise that men do not always act on inferences as to means and ends. I argued that men often act in politics under the immediate stimulus of affection and instinct, and that affection and interest may be directed towards political ent.i.ties which are very different from those facts in the world around us which we can discover by deliberate observation and a.n.a.lysis.

In this chapter I propose to consider the second a.s.sumption, and to inquire how far it is true that men, when they do form inferences as to the result of their political actions, always form them by a process of reasoning.

In such an inquiry one meets the preliminary difficulty that it is very hard to arrive at a clear definition of reasoning. Any one who watches the working of his own mind will find that it is by no means easy to trace these sharp distinctions between various mental states, which seem so obvious when they are set out in little books on psychology. The mind of man is like a harp, all of whose strings throb together; so that emotion, impulse, inference, and the special kind of inference called reasoning, are often simultaneous and intermingled aspects of a single mental experience.

This is especially true in moments of action and excitement; but when we are sitting in pa.s.sive contemplation we would often find it hard to say whether our successive states of consciousness are best described as emotions or inferences. And when our thought clearly belongs to the type of inference it is often hard to say whether its steps are controlled by so definite a purpose of discovering truth that we are ent.i.tled to call it reasoning.

Even when we think with effort and with a definite purpose, we do not always draw inferences or form beliefs of any kind. If we forget a name we say the alphabet over to ourselves and pause at each letter to see if the name we want will be suggested to us. When we receive bad news we strive to realise it by allowing successive mental a.s.sociations to arise of themselves, and waiting to discover what the news will mean for us. A poet broods with intense creative effort on the images which appear in his mind and arranges them, not in order to discover truth, but in order to attain an artistic and dramatic end. In Prospero's great speech in _The Tempest_ the connection between the successive images--the baseless fabric of this vision--the cloud-capped towers--the gorgeous palaces--the solemn temples--the great globe itself--is, for instance, one not of inference but of reverie, heightened by creative effort, and subordinated to poetic intention.

Most of the actual inferences which we draw during any day belong, indeed, to a much humbler type of thought than do some of the higher forms of non-inferential a.s.sociation. Many of our inferences, like the quasi-instinctive impulses which they accompany and modify, take place when we are making no conscious effort at all. In such a purely instinctive action as leaping backwards from a falling stone, the impulse to leap and the inference that there is danger, are simply two names for a single automatic and unconscious process. We can speak of instinctive inference as well as of instinctive impulse; we draw, for instance, by an instinctive mental process, inferences as to the distance and solidity of objects from the movements of our eye-muscles in focussing, and from the difference between the images on our two retinas. We are unaware of the method by which we arrive at these inferences, and even when we know that the double photograph in the stereoscope is flat, or that the conjurer has placed two converging sheets of looking-gla.s.s beneath his table, we can only say that the photograph 'looks' solid, or that we 'seem' to see right under the table.

The whole process of inference, rational or non-rational, is indeed built up from the primary fact that one mental state may call up another, either because the two have been a.s.sociated together in the history of the individual, or because a connection between the two has proved useful in the history of the race. If a man and his dog stroll together down the street they turn to the right hand or the left, hesitate or hurry in crossing the road, recognise and act upon the bicycle bell and the cabman's shout, by using the same process of inference to guide the same group of impulses. Their inferences are for the most part effortless, though sometimes they will both be seen to pause until they have settled some point by wordless deliberation. It is only when a decision has to be taken affecting the more distant purposes of his life that the man enters on a region of definitely rational thought where the dog cannot follow him, in which he uses words, and is more or less conscious of his own logical methods.

But the weakness of inference by automatic a.s.sociation as an instrument of thought consists in the fact that either of a pair of a.s.sociated ideas may call up the other without reference to their logical connection. The effect calls up the cause as freely as the cause calls up the effect. A patient under a hypnotic trance is wonderfully rapid and fertile in drawing inferences, but he hunts the scent backward as easily as he does forward. Put a dagger in his hand and he believes that he has committed a murder. The sight of an empty plate convinces him that he has had dinner. If left to himself he will probably go through routine actions well enough. But any one who understands his condition can make him act absurdly.

In the same way when we dream we draw absurd inferences by a.s.sociation.

The feeling of discomfort due to slight indigestion produces a belief that we are about to speak to a large audience and have mislaid our notes, or are walking along the Brighton Parade in a night-s.h.i.+rt. Even when men are awake, those parts of their mind to which for the moment they are not giving full attention are apt to draw equally unfounded inferences. A conjurer who succeeds in keeping the attention of his audience concentrated on the observation of what he is doing with his right hand can make them draw irrational conclusions from the movements of his left hand. People in a state of strong religious emotion sometimes become conscious of a throbbing sound in their ears, due to the increased force of their circulation. An organist, by opening the thirty-two foot pipe, can create the same sensation, and can thereby induce in the congregation a vague and half-conscious belief that they are experiencing religious emotion.

The political importance of all this consists in the fact that most of the political opinions of most men are the result, not of reasoning tested by experience, but of unconscious or half-conscious inference fixed by habit. It is indeed mainly in the formation of tracks of thought that habit shows its power in politics. In our other activities habit is largely a matter of muscular adaptation, but the bodily movements of politics occur so seldom that nothing like a habit can be set up by them. One may see a respectable voter, whose political opinions have been smoothed and polished by the mental habits of thirty years, fumbling over the act of marking and folding his ballot paper like a child with its first copybook.

Some men even seem to reverence most those of their opinions whose origin has least to do with deliberate reasoning. When Mr. Barrie's Bowie Haggart said: 'I am of opeenion that the works of Burns is of an immoral tendency. I have not read them myself, but such is my opeenion,'[20] he was comparing the merely rational conclusion which might have resulted from a reading of Burns's works with the conviction about them which he found ready-made in his mind, and which was the more sacred to him and more intimately his own, because he did not know how it was produced.

[20] _Auld Licht Idylls_, p. 220.

Opinion thus unconsciously formed is a fairly safe guide in the affairs of our daily life. The material world does not often go out of its way to deceive us, and our final convictions are the resultant of many hundreds of independent fleeting inferences, of which the valid are more numerous and more likely to survive than the fallacious. But even in our personal affairs our memory is apt to fade, and we can often remember the a.s.sociation between two ideas, while forgetting the cause which created that a.s.sociation. We discover in our mind a vague impression that Simpson is a drunkard, and cannot recollect whether we ever had any reason to believe it, or whether some one once told us that Simpson had a cousin who invented a cure for drunkenness. When the connection is remembered in a telling phrase, and when its origin has never been consciously noticed, we may find ourselves with a really vivid belief for which we could, if cross-examined, give no account whatever. When, for instance, we have heard an early-Victorian Bishop called 'Soapy Sam'

half a dozen times we get a firm conviction of his character without further evidence.

Under ordinary circ.u.mstances not much harm is done by this fact; because a name would not be likely to 'catch on' unless a good many people really thought it appropriate, and unless it 'caught on' we should not be likely to hear it more than once or twice. But in politics, as in the conjuring trade, it is often worth while for some people to take a great deal of trouble in order to produce such an effect without waiting for the idea to enforce itself by merely accidental repet.i.tion. I have already said that political parties try to give each other bad names by an organised system of mental suggestion.

If the word 'Wastrel,' for instance, appears on the contents bills of the _Daily Mail_ one morning as a name for the Progressives during a County Council election, a pa.s.senger riding on an omnibus from Putney to the Bank will see it half-consciously at least a hundred times, and will have formed a fairly stable mental a.s.sociation by the end of the journey. If he reflected, he would know that only one person has once decided to use the word, but he does not reflect, and the effect on him is the same as if a hundred persons had used it independently of each other. The contents-bills, indeed, of the newspapers, which were originally short and pithy merely from considerations of s.p.a.ce, have developed in a way which threatens to turn our streets (like the advertis.e.m.e.nt pages of an American magazine) into a psychological laboratory for the unconscious production of permanent a.s.sociations.

'Another German Insult,' 'Keir Hardie's Crime,' 'Balfour Backs Down,'

are intended to stick and do stick in the mind as ready-made opinions.

In all this again the same rule holds as in the production of impulse.

Things that are nearer sense, nearer to our more ancient evolutionary past, produce a readier inference as well as a more compelling impulse.

When a new candidate on his first appearance smiles at his const.i.tuents exactly as if he were an old friend, not only does he appeal, as I said in an earlier chapter, to an ancient and immediate instinct of human affection, but he produces at the same time a shadowy belief that he is an old friend; and his agent may even imply this, provided that he says nothing definite enough to arouse critical and rational attention. By the end of the meeting one can safely go as far as to call for three cheers for 'good old Jones.'[21]

[21] Three-quarters of the art of the trained salesman depends upon his empirical knowledge of this group of psychological facts. A small girl of my acquaintance, explaining why she had brought back from her first independent shopping expedition a photograph frame which she herself found to be distressing, said: 'The shopman seemed to suppose I had chosen it, and so I paid for it and came away.' But her explanation was the result of memory and reflection. At the moment, in a shadowy way which was sufficient for the shopman, she supposed that she had chosen it.

Mr. G.K. Chesterton some years ago quoted from a magazine article on American elections a sentence which said: 'A little sound common-sense often goes further with an audience of American working men than much high-flown argument. A speaker who, as he brought forward his points, hammered nails into a board, won hundreds of votes for his side at the last Presidential election.'[22] The 'sound common-sense' consisted, not, as Mr. Chesterton pretended to believe, in the presentation of the hammering as a logical argument, but in the orator's knowledge of the way in which force is given to non-logical inference and his willingness to use that knowledge.