We can only with difficulty resist the instincts of sex and food, of anger and fear, which we share with the higher animals.  It is, on the other hand, difficult for us to obey consistently the impulses which attend on the mental images formed by inference and association.  A man may be convinced by a long train of cogent reasoning that he will go to hell if he visits a certain house; and yet he will do so in satisfaction of a half conscious craving, whose existence he is ashamed to recognise.  It may be that when a preacher makes hell real to him by physical images of fire and torment his conviction will acquire coercive force.  But that force may soon die away as his memory fades, and even the most vivid description has little effect as compared with a touch of actual pain.  At the theatre, because pure emotion is facile, three-quarters of the audience may cry, but because second-hand emotion is shallow, very few of them will be unable to sleep when they get home, or will even lose their appetite for a late supper.  My South African trooper probably recovered from his tears over ‘Our Boys’ as soon as they were shed.  The transient and pleasurable quality of the tragic emotions produced by novel reading is well known.  A man may weep over a novel which he will forget in two or three hours, although the same man may be made insane, or may have his character changed for life, by actual experiences which are far less terrible than those of which he reads, experiences which at the moment may produce neither tears nor any other obvious nervous effect.

Both those facts are of first-rate political importance in those great modern communities in which all the events which stimulate political action reach the voters through newspapers.  The emotional appeal of journalism, even more than that of the stage, is facile because it is pure, and transitory because it is second-hand.  Battles and famines, murders and the evidence of inquiries into destitution, all are presented by the journalist in literary form, with a careful selection of ‘telling’ detail.  Their effect is therefore produced at once, in the half-hour that follows the middle-class breakfast, or in the longer interval on the Sunday morning when the workman reads his weekly paper.  But when the paper has been read the emotional effect fades rapidly away.

Any candidate at an election feels for this reason the strangeness of the conditions under which what Professor James calls the ’pungent sense of effective reality,’[9] reaches or fails to reach, mankind, in a civilisation based upon newspapers.  I was walking along the street during my last election, thinking of the actual issues involved, and comparing them with the vague fog of journalistic phrases, the half-conscious impulses of old habit and new suspicion which make up the atmosphere of electioneering.  I came round a street corner upon a boy of about fifteen returning from work, whose whole face lit up with genuine and lively interest as soon as he saw me.  I stopped, and he said:  ‘I know you, Mr. Wallas, you put the medals on me.’  All that day political principles and arguments had refused to become real to my constituents, but the emotion excited by the bodily fact that I had at a school ceremony pinned a medal for good attendance on a boy’s coat, had all the pungency of a first-hand experience.