The habit of repetition develops a credulous and incurious mind. It produces a type of person who not only accepts his beliefs second-hand, but also tends to over-simplify any subject under consideration, and so never get to the bottom of it as an educated mind should strive to do. It is very convenient to stop speculation with a half-true generalization stated as the conclusion of the whole matter. We love big words; catch phrases are easy to remember and to repeat. Moral and religious teachers know this, hence their use of aphorisms. One does not stop to analyze an aphorism; it is self-evident, final. Propagandists and advertisers are also aware of this human trait, and they delight in making slogans for us. “I’d walk a mile for a Camel,” “Children cry for it,” “Four out of five now lose,” are examples of a type of advertising familiar to all. Recently an effort was made in New York to check the “crime wave” with a slogan. A poster addressed to potential robbers was displayed in various parts of the city containing the words, “You can’t win.” A comparison of the number of convictions with the number of crimes of violence would seem to indicate that this slogan had about the same measure of truthfulness as most others. Slogans used in commercial advertising are for the most part innocent enough. But there are slogans used in types of propaganda which are not innocent. I will discuss the distortion of fact later; my point is that the type of phrase-making we are discussing tends at best to close the mind. Every movement tends to dry up into a verbal cult with a fixed phraseology the repetition of which seems to satisfy the adherents’ hunger for truth. The thinking of most men consists of little more than the repetition of the phrases which characterize the group to which they belong. There are groups which regularly assemble to listen to their familiar verbal formulas repeated again and again, deriving much satisfaction from the time-worn phrases. Any deviation from regularity or omission of any part is resented in the same spirit that caused primitive men to hold that any deviation from the magic ritual was sinful. It was the observation of this wide-spread trait in many forms that led me to the conclusion that there is practically only one soap-box speech on socialism, one address on the principles of the single tax, one revival sermon, one type of campaign speech for each party. At least I find that most members of any movement all say the same thing. If one knows what kind of an “_ist_” a man happens to be and is familiar with the ritual of that “_ism_,” one can ordinarily predict what the man will say on any subject. Frequently propagandists do not recognize their own principles when they hear them stated in ordinary English.