a commonplace in the annals of hysteria. But let us examine
the mechanism. Suppose that I had wanted to keep that drinking-glass for
my own personal use. A perfectly simple and effective expedient it would
have been in the absence of other good motives to capitalize that
antipathy by allowing her to see the dog drink out of the glass. The
case would then have been a perfect case of propaganda. All propaganda
is capitalized prejudice. It rests on some emotional premise which is
the motive force of the process. The emotional transfer is worked by
some associative process like similarity, use, or the causal
relationship. The derived sympathetic antipathy represents the goal.

The great self-preservative, social, and racial instincts will always
furnish the main reservoir of motive forces at the service of
propaganda. They will have the widest and the most insistent appeal.
Only second to these in importance are the peculiar racial tendencies
and historical traditions that represent the genius of a civilization.
The racial-superiority consciousness of the Germans operated as a
never-ending motive for their "Aushalten" propaganda. We Americans have
a notable cultural premise in our consideration for the underdog. Few
things outside our consciousness of family will arouse us as surely and
as universally as this modification of the protective instinct.

In addition to the group tendencies that arise from a community of
experience, individual propaganda may use every phase of individual
experience, individual bias and prejudice. I am told that first-class
salesmen not infrequently keep family histories of their customers,
producing a favorable attitude toward their merchandise by way of an
apparent personal interest in the children. Apparently any group of
ideas with an emotional valence may become the basis for propaganda.

There are three limitations to the processes of propaganda. The first is
emotional recoil, the second is the exhaustion of available motive
force, the third is the development of internal resistance or
negativism.

The most familiar of the three is emotional recoil. We know only too
well what will happen if we tell a boy all the things that he likes to
do are "bad," while all the things that he dislikes are "good." Up to a
certain point the emotional value of bad and good respectively will be
transferred to the acts as we intend. But each transfer has an emotional
recoil on the concepts good and bad. At