[22] Heretics, p. 122.

When a vivid association has been once formed it sinks into the mass of our mental experience, and may then undergo developments and transformations with which deliberate ratiocination had very little to do.  I have been told that when an English agitation against the importation of Chinese contract labour into South Africa was proposed, an important personage said that ‘there was not a vote in it.’  But the agitation was set on foot, and was based on a rational argument that the conditions enacted by the Ordinance amounted to a rather cruel kind of slavery imposed upon unusually intelligent Asiatics.  Any one, however, who saw much of politics in the winter of 1905-6 must have noticed that the pictures of Chinamen on the hoardings aroused among very many of the voters an immediate hatred of the Mongolian racial type.

This hatred was transferred to the Conservative party, and towards the end of the general election of 1906 a picture of a Chinaman thrown suddenly on a lantern screen before a working-class audience would have aroused an instantaneous howl of indignation against Mr. Balfour.

After the election, however, the memory of the Chinese faces on the posters tended slowly to identify itself, in the minds of the Conservatives, with the Liberals who had used them.  I had at the general election worked in a constituency in which many such posters were displayed by my side, and where we were beaten.  A year later I stood for the London County Council in the same constituency.  An hour before the close of the poll I saw, with the unnatural clearness of polling-day fatigue, a large white face at the window of the ward committee-room, while a hoarse voice roared:  ’Where’s your bloody pigtail?  We cut it off last time:  and now we’ll put it round your bloody neck and strangle you.’

In February 1907, during the County Council election, there appeared on the London hoardings thousands of posters which were intended to create a belief that the Progressive members on the Council made their personal livelihood by defrauding the ratepayers.  If a statement had been published to that effect it would have been an appeal to the critical intellect, and could have been met by argument, or in the law courts.  But the appeal was made to the process of subconscious inference.  The poster consisted of a picture of a man supposed to represent the Progressive Party, pointing a foreshortened finger and saying, with sufficient ambiguity to escape the law of libel:  ’It’s your money we want.’  Its effectiveness depended on its exploitation of the fact that most men judge of the truth of a charge of fraud by a series of rapid and unconscious inferences from the appearance of the man accused.  The person represented was, if judged by the shape of his hat, the fashion of his watch-chain and ring, the neglected condition of his teeth, and the redness of his nose, obviously a professional sharper.  He was, I believe, drawn