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 association between two ideas, while forgetting the cause which
created that association. 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 circumstances 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 repetition. 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 passenger 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 association 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 hundre