oor Law Guardians, for instance), in which he is not specially
interested, and of the fact that his attention is either not aroused at
all, or is only aroused by words and phrases which recall some habitual
train of thought. By the time that he has become sufficiently confident
or important to draw up a political programme for himself, he
understands the limits within which any utterance must be confined that
is addressed to large numbers of voters--the fact that proposals are
only to be brought 'within the sphere of practical politics' which are
simple, striking, and carefully adapted to the half-conscious memories
and likes and dislikes of busy men.

All this means that his own power of political reasoning is being
trained. He is learning that every man differs from every other man in
his interests, his intellectual habits and powers, and his experience,
and that success in the control of political forces depends on a
recognition of this and a careful appreciation of the common factors of
human nature. But meanwhile it is increasingly difficult for him to
believe that he is appealing to the same process of reasoning in his
hearers as that by which he reaches his own conclusions. He tends, that
is to say, to think of the voters as the subject-matter rather than the
sharers of his thoughts. He, like Plato's sophist, is learning what the
public is, and is beginning to understand 'the passions and desires' of
that 'huge and powerful brute, how to approach and handle it, at what
times it becomes fiercest and most gentle, on what occasions it utters
its several cries, and what sounds made by others soothe or irritate
it.'[50] If he resolutely guards himself against the danger of passing
from one illusion to another, he may still remember that he is not the
only man in the constituency who has reasoned and is reasoning about
politics. If he does personal canvassing he may meet sometimes a
middle-aged working man, living nearer than himself to the facts of
life, and may find that this constituent of his has reasoned patiently
and deeply on politics for thirty years, and that he himself is a rather
absurd item in the material of that reasoning. Or he may talk with a
business man, and be forced to understand some one who sees perhaps more
clearly than himself the results of his proposals, but who is separated
from him by the gulf of a difference of desire: that which one hopes the
other fears.

[50] Plato, _Republic_, p. 493.