away.

Any candidate at an election feels for this reason the strangeness of
the conditions under which what Professor James calls the 'pungent sense
of effective reality,'[9] reaches or fails to reach, mankind, in a
civilisation based upon newspapers. I was walking along the street
during my last election, thinking of the actual issues involved, and
comparing them with the vague fog of journalistic phrases, the
half-conscious impulses of old habit and new suspicion which make up
the atmosphere of electioneering. I came round a street corner upon a
boy of about fifteen returning from work, whose whole face lit up with
genuine and lively interest as soon as he saw me. I stopped, and he
said: 'I know you, Mr. Wallas, you put the medals on me.' All that day
political principles and arguments had refused to become real to my
constituents, but the emotion excited by the bodily fact that I had at a
school ceremony pinned a medal for good attendance on a boy's coat, had
all the pungency of a first-hand experience.

[9] 'The moral tragedy of human life comes almost wholly from the fact
that the link is ruptured which normally should hold between vision of
the truth and action, and that this pungent sense of effective reality
will not attach to certain ideas.' W. James, _Principles of Psychology_,
vol. ii. p. 547.

Throughout the contest the candidate is made aware, at every point, of
the enormously greater solidity for most men of the work-a-day world
which they see for themselves, as compared with the world of inference
and secondary ideas which they see through the newspapers. A London
County Councillor, for instance, as his election comes near, and he
begins to withdraw from the daily business of administrative committees