ecided
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 associations 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apparently soon superseded, but elsewhere it long suggested that Sir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 association a good name, if its
associations 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
associations. 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 assertions to be consciously
accepted or rejected.

The whole relation between party entities and political impulse can
perhaps be best illustrated from the art of advertisement. In
advertisement the intellectual process can be watched apart from its
ethical implications, and advertisement and party politics are becoming
more and more closely assimilated in method. The political poster is
placed side by side with the trade or theatrical poster on the
hoardings, 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 'entity,' a 'tea' which
men can think and feel about? A hundred years ago he would have made a
number of optimi