(1) We desire an opinion to be right because we would be personally benefited if it were. Promise a man that if he invests his money in the Lookgood Gold Mine he will receive dividends of over 40 per cent. annually, and he is in danger of becoming extremely gullible. He shirks looking up the previous record of the promoters or directors because he has a secret and indefined fear that if he does he will find their pictures in the Rogues’ Gallery. Advertise in a magazine that any thin man can gain seven to fourteen pounds a week by drinking Fattilac and you will receive hundreds of answers enclosing the fifty cents for a trial bottle. Not one desperately slim man in ten will stop to ask himself how the miracle can be performed. In fact, he will do his worst to argue himself into the matter. He will tell himself that the advertisement is in a reliable magazine, that the company would not dare to make an assertion like that unless it could make good, that . . . But we may pass over the more obvious benefits, and proceed to those causes of prejudice less consciously selfish or directly beneficial. If an economist were to write a book attempting to prove that bankers were really unnecessary and could be dispensed with, it is a rather sure guess that a banker would not regard very highly the intellectual powers of that economist. If he considered his arguments at all, it would be only with the view of refuting them. In an even less conscious way, a rich man is likely to oppose socialism or communism, not so much because he has evidence of intrinsic worth against them, but because he fears that if such systems of society were put into effect he would lose most of his wealth. The man who has nothing is likely to look with favor upon these schemes, because they offer him promise of better things. The mere fact that we are ignorant of a certain thing will prejudice us against it, while knowledge of it will prepossess us in its favor. Ten chances to one a person who has been taught Esperanto will favor the adoption of an international language—and the adoption of Esperanto in particular. Most of the remarks on the uselessness of the classics come from those ignorant of them; while those who, in order to get a college degree or for some like reason, have been forced to study Greek and Latin, will generally always exaggerate their importance. Most of the opposition to simplified spelling is due to the fact that having taken the time and toil to master our atrociously inconsistent spelling, people have a vague fear that if a phonetic system were adopted, children, the ignorant classes and persons of poor memories would be able to spell just as well as they, without one quarter the trouble of learning. Not that they are conscious of this childish and unworthy attitude, for usually they are not, but the motive is operative none the less.