ourse, points of conduct which are common to all occupations. We must
all try to be kind, and honest, and industrious, and we expect the
general teachers of morals to help us to do so. But every occupation has
also its special problems, which must be stated by its own students
before they can be dealt with by the moralist at all.

In politics the most important of these special questions of conduct is
concerned with the relation between the process by which the politician
forms his own opinions and purposes, and that by which he influences the
opinions and purposes of others.

A hundred or even fifty years ago, those who worked for a democracy of
which they had had as yet no experience felt no misgivings on this point
They looked on reasoning, not as a difficult and uncertain process, but
as the necessary and automatic working of man's mind when faced by
problems affecting his interest. They assumed, therefore, that the
citizens under a democracy would necessarily be guided by reason in the
use of their votes, that those politicians would be most successful who
made their own conclusions and the grounds for them most clear to
others, and that good government would be secured if the voters had
sufficient opportunities of listening to free and sincere discussion.

A candidate to-day who comes fresh from his books to the platform almost
inevitably begins by making the same assumption.

He prepares his speeches and writes his address with the conviction that
on his demonstration of the relation between political causes and
effects will depend the result of the election. Perhaps his first shock
will come from that maxim which every professional agent repeats over
and over again to every candidate, 'Meetings are no good.' Those who
attend meetings are, he is told, in nine cases out of ten, already loyal
and habitual supporters of his party. If his speeches are logically
unanswerable the chief political importance of that fact is to be found,
not in his power of convincing those who are already convinced, but in
the greater enthusiasm and willingness to canvass which may be produced
among his supporters by their admiration of him as a speaker.

Later on he learns to estimate the way in which his address and that of
his opponent appeal to the constituents. He may, for instance, become
suddenly aware of the attitude of mind with which he himself opens the
envelopes containing other candidates addresses in some election (of
P