122.
When a vivid association has been once formed it sinks into the mass of our mental experience, and may then undergo developments and transformations with which deliberate ratiocination had very little to do.

I have been told that when an English agitation against the importation of Chinese contract labour into South Africa was proposed, an important personage said that 'there was not a vote in it.' But the agitation was set on foot, and was based on a rational argument that the conditions enacted by the Ordinance amounted to a rather cruel kind of slavery imposed upon unusually intelligent Asiatics.

Any one, however, who saw much of politics in the winter of 1905-6 must have noticed that the pictures of Chinamen on the hoardings aroused among very many of the voters an immediate hatred of the Mongolian racial type.
This hatred was transferred to the Conservative party, and towards the end of the general election of 1906 a picture of a Chinaman thrown suddenly on a lantern screen before a working-class audience would have aroused an instantaneous howl of indignation against Mr.Balfour.
After the election, however, the memory of the Chinese faces on the posters tended slowly to identify itself, in the minds of the Conservatives, with the Liberals who had used them.

I had at the general election worked in a constituency in which many such posters were displayed by my side, and where we were beaten.

A year later I stood for the London County Council in the same constituency.