Nowadays, therefore, such an advertiser would practice on our automatic and subconscious associations. He would choose some term, say 'Parramatta Tea,' which would produce in most men a vague suggestion of the tropical East, combined with the subconscious memory of a geography lesson on Australia. He would then proceed to create in connection with the word an automatic picture-image having previous emotional associations of its own. By the time that a hundred thousand pounds had been cleverly spent, no one in England would be able to see the word 'Parramatta' on a parcel without a vague impulse to buy, founded on a day-dream recollection of his grandmother, or of the British fleet, or of a pretty young English matron, or of any other subject that the advertiser had chosen for its association with the emotions of trust or affection. When music plays a larger part in English public education it may be possible to use it effectively for advertisement, and a 'Parramatta Motif' would in that case appear in all the pantomimes, in connection, say, with a song about the Soldier's Return, and would be squeaked by a gramophone in every grocer's shop.

This instance has the immense advantage, as an aid to clearness of thought, that up to this point no Parramatta Tea exists, and no one has even settled what sort of tea shall be provided under that name. Parramatta tea is still a commercial entity pure and simple. It may later on be decided to sell very poor tea at a large profit until the original associations of the name have been gradually superseded by the association of disappointment. Or it may be decided to experiment by selling different teas under that name in different places, and to push the sale of the flavour which 'takes on.' But there are other attractive names of teas on the hoardings, with associations of babies, and bull-dogs, and the Tower of London. If it is desired to develop a permanent trade in competition with these it will probably be found wisest to supply tea of a fairly uniform quality, and with a distinctive flavour which may act as its 'meaning.' The great difficulty will then come when there is a change of public taste, and when the sales fall off because the chosen flavour no longer pleases. The directors may think it safest to go on selling the old flavour to a diminishing number of customers, or they may gradually substitute another flavour, taking the risk that the number of housewives who say, 'This is not the real Parramatta Tea,' may be balanced by the number of those who say, 'Parramatta Tea has improved.' If people will not buy the old flavour at all, and prefer to buy the new flavour under a new name, the Parramatta Tea Company must be content to disappear, like a religion which has made an unsuccessful attempt to put new wine into old bottles.

All these conditions are as familiar to the party politician as they are to the advertiser. The party candidate is, at his first appearance, to most of his constituents merely a packet with the name of Liberal or Conservative upon it. That name has associations of colour and music, of traditional habit and affection, which, when once formed, exist independently of the party policy. Unless he bears the party label—unless he is, as the Americans say, a 'regular' candidate—not only will those habits and affections be cut off from him, but he will find it extraordinarily difficult to present himself as a tangible entity to the electors at all. A proportion of the electors, varying greatly at different times and at different places, will vote for the 'regular' nominee of their party without reference to his programme, though to the rest of them, and always to the nominating committee, he must also present a programme which can be identified with the party policy. But, in any case, as long as he is a party candidate, he must remember that it is in that character that he speaks and acts. The party prepossessions and party expectations of his constituents alone make it possible for them to think and feel with him. When he speaks there is between him and his audience the party mask, larger and less mobile than his own face, like the mask which enabled actors to be seen and heard in the vast open-air theatres of Greece. If he can no longer act the part with sincerity he must either leave the stage or present himself in the mask of another party.

Party leaders again have always to remember that the organisation which they control is an entity with an existence in the memory and emotions of the electors, independent of their own opinions and actions. This does not mean that party leaders cannot be sincere. As individuals they can indeed only preserve their political life by being in constant readiness to lose it. Sometimes they must even risk the existence of their party itself. When Sir Robert Peel was converted to Free Trade in 1845, he had to decide whether he and his friends should shatter the Tory Party by leaving it, or should so transform its policy that it might not be recognised, even in the half-conscious logic of habit and association, as that entity for which men had voted and worked four years before. In either case Peel was doing something other and more serious than the expression of his individual opinion on a question of the moment. And yet, if, recognising this, he had gone on advocating corn duties for the sake of his party, his whole personal force as a politician, and therefore even his party value, would have been lost.

If a celestial intelligence were now to look down from heaven on the earth with the power of observing every fact about all human beings at once, he might ask, as the newspaper editors are asking as I write, what that Socialism is which influences so many lives? He might answer himself with a definition which could be clumsily translated as 'a movement towards greater social equality, depending for its force upon three main factors, the growing political power of the working classes, the growing social sympathy of many members of all classes, and the belief, based on the growing authority of scientific method, that social arrangements can be transformed by means of conscious and deliberate contrivance.' He would see men trying to forward this movement by proposals as to taxation, wages, and regulative or collective administration; some of which proposals would prove to be successfully adapted to the facts of human existence and some would in the end be abandoned, either because no nation could be persuaded to try them or because when tried they failed. But he would also see that this definition of a many-sided and ever-varying movement drawn by abstraction from innumerable socialistic proposals and desires is not a description of 'Socialism' as it exists for the greater number of its supporters. The need of something which one may love and for which one may work has created for thousands of working men a personified 'Socialism,' a winged goddess with stern eyes and drawn sword to be the hope of the world and the protector of those that suffer. The need of some engine of thought which one may use with absolute faith and certainty has also created another Socialism, not a personification, but a final and authoritative creed. Such a creed appeared in England in 1884, and William Morris took it down in his beautiful handwriting from Mr. Hyndman's lectures. It was the revelation which made a little dimly educated working man say to me three years later, with tears of genuine humility in his eyes, 'How strange it is that this glorious truth has been hidden from all the clever and learned men of the world and shown to me.'

Meanwhile Socialism is always a word, a symbol used in common speech and writing. A hundred years hence it may have gone the way of its predecessors—Leveller, Saint-Simonism, Communism, Chartism—and may survive only in histories of a movement which has since undergone other transformations and borne other names. It may, on the other hand, remain, as the Republic has remained in France, to be the title on coins and public buildings of a movement which after many disappointments and disillusionments has succeeded in establishing itself as a government.

But the use of a word in common speech is only the resultant of its use by individual men and women, and particularly by those who accept it as a party name. Each one of them, as long as the movement is really alive, will find that while the word must be used, because otherwise the movement will have no political existence, yet its use creates a constant series of difficult problems in conduct. Any one who applies the name to himself or others in a sense so markedly different from common use as to make it certain or probable that he is creating a false impression is rightly charged with want of ordinary veracity. And yet there are cases where enormous practical results may depend upon keeping wide the use of a word which is tending to be narrowed. The 'Modernist' Roman Catholic who has studied the history of religion uses the term 'Catholic Church' to mean a society which has gone through various intellectual stages in the past, and which depends for its vitality upon the existence of reasonable freedom of change in the future. He therefore calls himself a Catholic. To the Pope and his advisers, on the other hand, the Church is an unchanging miracle based on an unchanging revelation. Father Tyrrell, when he says that he 'believes' in the Catholic Church, though he obviously disbelieves in the actual occurrence of most of the facts which constitute the original revelation, seems to them to be simply a liar, who is stealing their name for his own fraudulent purposes. They can no more understand him than can the Ultramontanes among the German Social-Democrats understand Bernstein and his Modernist allies. Bernstein himself, on the other hand, has to choose whether he ought to try to keep open the common use of the name Socialist, or whether in the end he will have to abandon it, because his claim to use it merely creates bad feeling and confusion of thought.

Sometimes a man of exceptional personal force and power of expression is, so to speak, a party—a political entity—in himself. He may fashion a permanent and recognisable mask for himself as 'Honest John' or 'The Grand Old Man.' But this can as a rule only be done by those who learn the main condition of their task, the fact that if an individual statesman's intellectual career is to exist for the mass of the present public at all, it must be based either on an obstinate adherence to unchanging opinions or on a development, slow, simple, and consistent. The indifferent and half attentive mind which most men turn towards politics is like a very slow photograph plate. He who wishes to be clearly photographed must stand before it in the same attitude for a long time. A bird that flies across the plate leaves no mark.

'Change of opinion,' wrote Gladstone in 1868, 'in those to whose judgment the public looks more or less to assist its own, is an evil to the country, although a much smaller evil than their persistence in a course which they know to be wrong. It is not always to be blamed. But it is always to be watched with vigilance; always to be challenged and put upon its trial.'[[19]] Most statesmen avoid this choice between the loss of force resulting from a public change of opinion, and the loss of character resulting from the public persistence in an opinion privately abandoned, not only by considering carefully every change in their own conclusions, 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.

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.