Yet however sincerely such a candidate may respect the process by which
the more thoughtful both of those who vote for him and of those who vote
against him reach their conclusions, he is still apt to feel that his
own part in the election has little to do with any reasoning process at
all. I remember that before my first election my most experienced
political friend said to me, 'Remember that you are undertaking a six
weeks' advertising campaign.' Time is short, there are innumerable
details to arrange, and the candidate soon returns from the rare
intervals of mental contact with individual electors to that advertising
campaign which deals with the electors as a whole. As long as he is so
engaged, the maxim that it is wrong to appeal to anything but the
severest process of logical thought in his constituents will seem to
him, if he has time to think of it, not so much untrue as irrelevant.

After a time the politician may cease even to desire to reason with his
constituents, and may come to regard them as purely irrational
creatures of feeling and opinion, and himself as the purely rational
'over-man' who controls them. It is at this point that a resolute and
able statesman may become most efficient and most dangerous.
Bolingbroke, while he was trying to teach his 'Patriot King' how to
govern men by understanding them, spoke in a haunting phrase of 'that
staring timid creature man.'[51] A century before Darwin he, like Swift
and Plato, was able by sheer intellectual detachment to see his
fellow-men as animals. He himself, he thought, was one of those few
'among the societies of men ... who engross almost the whole reason of
the species, who are born to instruct, to guide, and to preserve, who
are designed to be the tutors and the guardians of human kind.'[52] For
the rest, 'Reason has small effect upon numbers: a turn of imagination,
often as violent and as sudden as a gust of wind, determines their
conduct.'[53]

[51] _Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism_, etc. (ed. of 1785), p. 70.

[52] _Ibid._, p. 2.

[53] _Ibid._, p. 165.

The greatest of Bolingbroke's disciples was Disraeli, who wrote, 'We are
not indebted to the Reason of man for any of the great achievements
which are the landmarks of human action and human progress.... Man is
only truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but
when he appeals to the imagination. Even Mormon accounts more votaries
than Bentham.'[54] It was Disraeli w