But weighty reasons of racial character are quite unnecessary in establishing prejudice. Probably no two peoples in Europe are more closely related in race than the Germans and the English. A hundred years ago or more they were closest allies against Napoleon; during the World War, when political and economic conditions ranged them on opposite sides, each tried to show that it was a superior race, with no connection at all with the other, so far beneath it. Religious prejudice may be based on genuine differences, as between Jew and Christian, or on comparatively trivial matters as between Methodists and Baptists. The shifting nature of these prejudices and their purely personal application appears distinctly in the latest slogan of intolerance—“White, Protestant, Gentile, American.” All others, not conforming to this criterion, cannot be one hundred per centers. This excludes the Negro, as well as the Indian, who is certainly American but is not white. It eliminates the Jew, who is not a gentile; and the Catholic who is not a Protestant. And it excludes a white Protestant gentile of English or German birth, who may be everything else but is not American-born. Obviously, there is no logic in this, for classes are excluded for exactly opposite reasons. There is nothing in it except the one fact which always animates every kind of intolerance—the fact of difference. Walter Lippman in his “Public Opinion” presents a point which no discussion of prejudice can ignore—[55]“that the way we see things is a combination of what is there and of what we expected to find.” He works out the process of the “mental stereotype,” by which we have a preconception of the labor agitator, the alien, the Harvard man, and see the individual always in the light of the group to which we may attribute him. [56]“One factor, the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment. To that pseudo-environment his behavior is a response.” [57]“The pictures inside people’s heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside.” [58]On some natures, stimuli from the outside, especially when they are printed or spoken words, evoke some part of a system of stereotypes, so that the actual sensation and the preconception occupy consciousness at the same time. The two are blended, much as if we looked at red through blue glasses and saw green.... If the experience contradicts the stereotype, one of two things happens. If the man is no longer plastic, or if some powerful interest makes it highly inconvenient to rearrange his stereotypes, he pooh-poohs the contradiction as an exception that proves the rule, discredits the witness, finds a flaw somewhere, and manages to forget it. But if he still is curious and openminded, the novelty is taken into the picture and allowed to modify it.