Benham was not content to define and denounce the prejudices of
mankind. He set himself to study just exactly how these prejudices
worked, to get at the nature and habits and strengths of each kind
of prejudice, and to devise means for its treatment, destruction or
neutralization. He had no great faith in the power of pure
reasonableness; his psychological ideas were modern, and he had
grasped the fact that the power of most of the great prejudices that
strain humanity lies deeper than the intellectual level.
Consequently he sought to bring himself into the closest contact
with prejudices in action and prejudices in conflict in order to
discover their sub-rational springs.
A large proportion of that larger moiety of the material at
Westhaven Street which White from his extensive experience of the
public patience decided could not possibly "make a book," consisted
of notes and discussions upon the first-hand observations Benham had
made in this or that part of the world. He began in Russia during
the revolutionary trouble of 1906, he went thence to Odessa, and
from place to place in Bessarabia and Kieff, where during a pogrom
he had his first really illuminating encounter with race and culture
prejudice.
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