is only telling us to eat caviare on principle.  The physician, when he knows the part which mental suggestion plays in the cure of disease, may hate and fear his knowledge, but he cannot divest himself of it.  He finds himself watching the unintended effects of his words and tones and gestures, until he realises that in spite of himself he is calculating the means by which such effects can be produced.  After a time, even his patients may learn to watch the effect of ‘a good bedside manner’ on themselves.

[59] Heretics, 1905, p. 136.

So in politics, now that knowledge of the obscurer impulses of mankind is being spread (if only by the currency of new words), the relation both of the politician and the voter to those impulses is changing.  As soon as American politicians called a certain kind of specially paid orator a ‘spell-binder,’ the word penetrated through the newspapers from politicians to audiences.  The man who knows that he has paid two dollars to sit in a hall and be ‘spell-bound,’ feels, it is true, the old sensations, but feels them with a subtle and irrevocable difference.  The English newspaper reader who has once heard the word ‘sensational,’ may try to submit every morning the innermost sanctuary of his consciousness to the trained psychologists of the halfpenny journals.  He may, according to the suggestion of the day, loathe the sixty million crafty scoundrels who inhabit the German Empire, shudder at a coming comet, pity the cowards on the Government Front Bench, or tremble lest a pantomime lady should throw up her part.  But he cannot help the existence in the background of his consciousness of a self which watches, and, perhaps, is a little ashamed of his ‘sensations.’  Even the rapidly growing psychological complexity of modern novels and plays helps to complicate the relation of the men of our time to their emotional impulses.  The young tradesman who has been reading either Evan Harrington, or a novel by some writer who has read Evan Harrington, goes to shake hands with a countess at an entertainment given by the Primrose League, or the Liberal Social Council, conscious of pleasure, but to some degree critical of his pleasure.  His father, who read John Halifax, Gentleman, would have been carried away by a tenth part of the condescension which is necessary in the case of the son.  A voter who has seen John Bull’s Other Island at the theatre, is more likely than his father, who only saw The Shaughraun, to realise that one’s feelings on the Irish question can be thought about as well as felt.

In so far as this change extends, the politician may find in the future that an increasing proportion of his constituents half-consciously ’see through’ the cruder arts of emotional exploitation.

But such an unconscious or half-conscious extension of self-knowledge is not likely of itself to keep pace with the parallel development of the political art of controlling impulse.  The tendency, if it is to be effective, must be strengthened by the deliberate adoption and inculcation of new moral and intellectual conceptions—­new ideal entities to which our affections and desires may attach themselves.