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The Psychology of Jingoism

endeavour to correct their judgment by going to any other source.

All Englishmen capable of the least reflection must have known that, in the nature of the case, they were only hearing one side of the matters at issue, and that some suspension of judgment was reasonable. Every one of the educated persons who are so thoroughly convinced of the justice of our cause must admit that it is likely that the Dutch nation in Holland, drawing nearly all their information from Dutch South African sources, are animated by a bias similar to, though not so strong as, ours, have received a mass of evidence directly contradictory to ours, and that their intellectual judgment has been formed in a fashion similar to ours.

Wilful disregard of these considerations implies dishonesty. That dishonesty is evinced in, and illustrated by, specific cases of treatment of evidence. An example is the value attached to the interview which Mr. Theo Schreiner alleged that he had with Mr. Reitz, the State Secretary of the Transvaal, in which the latter admitted the plan to work for an independent Dutch republic. Here is a strong partisan, an agitator by profession, who produces from memory a long verbatim account of an