Note (return) — Chapter I

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.