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 and hostility of
England towards us in the Revolution, statements which they have to
remember and master by study from day to day, tinctured by the anxiety
about the examination ahead, when the students must know them or fail,
these incidents of school work being also tinctured by another emotion,
that of patriotism, enthusiasm for Washington, for the Declaration of
Independence, for Valley Forge--thus established in the regular way of
all complexes, this anti-English complex is fed and watered by what we
learn of the War of 1812, by what we learn of the Civil War of 1861, and
by many lesser events in our history thus far. And just as a Republican
will admit nothing good of a Democrat and a Democrat nothing good of a
Republican because of the political complex, so does the great--the
vast--majority of Americans automatically and easily remember everything
against England and forget everything in her favor. Just try it any day
you like. Ask any average American you are sitting next to in a train what
he knows about England; and if he does remember anything and can tell it
to you, it will be unfavorable nine times in ten. The mere word "England"
starts his complex off, and out comes every fact it has seized that
matches his school-implanted prejudice, just as it has rejected every fact
that does not match it. There is absolutely no other way to explain the
American habit of speaking ill of England and well of France. Several
times in the past, France has been flagrantly hostile to us. But there was