He prepares his speeches and writes his address with the conviction that on his demonstration of the relation between political causes and effects will depend the result of the election.  Perhaps his first shock will come from that maxim which every professional agent repeats over and over again to every candidate, ‘Meetings are no good.’  Those who attend meetings are, he is told, in nine cases out of ten, already loyal and habitual supporters of his party.  If his speeches are logically unanswerable the chief political importance of that fact is to be found, not in his power of convincing those who are already convinced, but in the greater enthusiasm and willingness to canvass which may be produced among his supporters by their admiration of him as a speaker.

Later on he learns to estimate the way in which his address and that of his opponent appeal to the constituents.  He may, for instance, become suddenly aware of the attitude of mind with which he himself opens the envelopes containing other candidates addresses in some election (of Poor 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