not so violent as the complex which has been planted in the German
people by forty years of very adroitly and carefully planned training:
they were taught to distrust and hate everybody and to consider
themselves so superior to anybody that their sacred duty as they saw it
in 1914 was to enslave the world in order to force upon the world the
priceless benefits of their Kultur. Under the shock of war that complex
dilated into a form of real hysteria or insanity. Our anti-English
com-plex is fortunately milder than that; but none the less does it
savor slightly, as any nerve specialist or psychological doctor would
tell you---it savors slightly of hysteria, that hundreds of thousands of
American men and women of every grade of education and ignorance should
automatically exclaim whenever the right button is pressed, "England is
a land-grabber," and "What has England done in the War?"

The word complex has been in our dictionary for a long while. This
familiar adjective has been made by certain scientific people into a
noun, and for brevity and convenience employed to denote something that
almost all of us harbor in some form or other. These complexes, these
lumps of ideas or impressions that match each other, that are of the
same pattern, and that are also invariably tinctured with either a
pleasurable or painful emotion, lie buried in our minds, unthought-of
but alive, and lurk always ready to set up a ferment, whenever some new
thing from outside that matches them enters the mind and hence starts
them off. The "suppressed complex" I need not describe, as our English
complex is by no means suppressed. Known to us all, probably, is the
political complex. Year after year we have been excited about elections
and candidates and policies, preferring one party to the other. If
this preference has been very marked, or even violent, you know how
disinclined we are to give credit to the other party for any act or
policy, no matter how excellent in itself, which, had our own party been
its sponsor, we should have been heart and soul for. You know how
easily we forget the good deeds of the opposite party and how easily
we remember its bad deeds. That's a good simple ordinary example of a
complex. Its workings can be discerned in the experience of us all. In
our present discussion it is very much to the point.

Established in the soft young minds of our school boys and girls by
a series of reiterated statements about the tyranny an