sions, but by a delay, which often seems cowardly and absurd, in
the public expression of their thoughts upon all questions except those
which are ripe for immediate action. The written or reported word
remains, and becomes part of that entity outside himself which the
stateman is always building or destroying or transforming.

[19] _Gleanings_, vol. vii. p. 100, quoted in Morley's _Life_, vol. i.
p. 211.

The same conditions affect other political entities besides parties and
statesmen. If a newspaper is to live as a political force it must
impress itself on men's minds as holding day by day to a consistent
view. The writers, not only from editorial discipline, but from the
instinctive desire to be understood, write in the character of their
paper's personality. If it is sold to a proprietor holding or wishing to
advocate different opinions, it must either frankly proclaim itself as a
new thing or must make it appear by slow and solemn argumentative steps
that the new attitude is a necessary development of the old. It is
therefore rightly felt that a capitalist who buys a paper for the sake
of using its old influence to strengthen a new movement is doing
something to be judged by other moral standards than those which apply
to the purchase of so much printing-machinery and paper. He may be
destroying something which has been a stable and intelligible entity for
thousands of plain people living in an otherwise unintelligible world,
and which has collected round it affection and trust as real as was ever
inspired by an orator or a monarch.

CHAPTER III

NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE IN POLITICS

The assumption--which is so closely interwoven with our habits of
political and economic thought--that men always act on a reasoned
opinion as to their interests, may be divided into two separate
assumptions: first, that men always act on some kind of inference as to
the best means of reaching a preconceived end, and secondly, that all
inferences are of the same kind, and are produced by a uniform process
of 'reasoning.'

In the two preceding chapters I dealt with the first assumption, and
attempted to show that it is important for a politician to realise that
men do not always act on inferences as to means and ends. I argued that
men often act in politics under the immediate stimulus of affection and
instinct, and that affection and interest may be directed towards
political entities which are very different from those f