ness
to use that knowledge.

[22] _Heretics_, p. 122.

When a vivid association has been once formed it sinks into the mass of
our mental experience, and may then undergo developments and
transformations with which deliberate ratiocination had very little to
do. I have been told that when an English agitation against the
importation of Chinese contract labour into South Africa was proposed,
an important personage said that 'there was not a vote in it.' But the
agitation was set on foot, and was based on a rational argument that the
conditions enacted by the Ordinance amounted to a rather cruel kind of
slavery imposed upon unusually intelligent Asiatics. Any one, however,
who saw much of politics in the winter of 1905-6 must have noticed that
the pictures of Chinamen on the hoardings aroused among very many of the
voters an immediate hatred of the Mongolian racial type.

This hatred was transferred to the Conservative party, and towards the
end of the general election of 1906 a picture of a Chinaman thrown
suddenly on a lantern screen before a working-class audience would have
aroused an instantaneous howl of indignation against Mr. Balfour.

After the election, however, the memory of the Chinese faces on the
posters tended slowly to identify itself, in the minds of the
Conservatives, with the Liberals who had used them. I had at the general
election worked in a constituency in which many such posters were
displayed by my side, and where we were beaten. A year later I stood for
the London County Council in the same constituency. An hour before the
close of the poll I saw, with the unnatural clearness of polling-day
fatigue, a large white face at the window of the ward committee-room,
while a hoarse voice roared: 'Where's your bloody pigtail? We cut it off
last time: and now we'll put it round your bloody neck and strangle
you.'

In February 1907, during the County Council election, there appeared on
the London hoardings thousands of posters which were intended to create
a belief that the Progressive members on the Council made their personal
livelihood by defrauding the ratepayers. If a statement had been
published to that effect it would have been an appeal to the critical
intellect, and could have been met by argument, or in the law courts.
But the appeal was made to the process of subconscious inference. The
poster consisted of a picture of a man supposed to represent the
Progressive Party, pointing a foreshorte