THE GIFT OF kZhmol I3lvi)jii, 75S3 Cornell University Library HM281 .C76 The crowd in peace and war. olin 3 1924 030 252 666 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030252666 THE CROWD IN PEACE AND WAR WORKS Br THE SAME AUTHOR The Woodcutters of the Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century, 1884 The Artistic Development of Reynolds and Gainsborough, 1886 Early Flemish Artists, 1887 The Literary Remains of Albrecht Durer, 1889 The Dawn of Art, 1891 Climbers Guides to the Pennine and Lepontine Alps, 1890, etc. Climbing and Exploration in the Karakoram-Himalayas, 1894 The Alps from End to End, 1895 The First Crossing of Spitsbergen, 1897 With Ski and Sledge over Arctic Glaciers, 1898 The Bolivian Andes, 1901 The Domain of Art, 1902 Early Tuscan Artists, 1902 Aconcagua and Tierra del Fuego, 1902 Great Masters, 1904 The Alps, 1904 Early Dutch and English Voyages to Spitsbergen, 1904 No Man's Land {History of Spitsbergen), 1906 The Sport of Collecting, 1914 THE CROWD IN PEACE AND WAR BY SIR MARTIN CONWAY LATE ROSCOE PROFESSOR OF ART, LIVERPOOL SLADE PROFESSOR OF ART, CAMBRIDGE PRESIDENT OF THE ALPINE CLUB Nullum esse librum tarn malum ut non ex aliqua parte prodesset. Pliny the Elder LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK LONDON, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS I9IS COPYRIGHT, 1915* BY LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. THE- PLIMPTON* PRBSS NORWOOD* MASS'U'S-A M. M. SOCERO DILECTO CONSILII LUCULENTI MEMOR ET GRATISSIMUS M. C. CONTENTS CHAPTEK PAGE - I. Kinds of Crowds 3 n. The Nature of Crowds 25 m. Crowd-Units 39 rV. Crowd-Continuity 57 V. Crowd-Instincts 70 ~" VI. Crowd-Compellers 88 Vn. Crowd-Exponents 101 Vm. Crowd-Representatives 114 IX. Crowd-Organisation 127 ' X. Government and the Crowd 137 ^ XI. Liberty and Freedom 166 — >XII. Education 182 ~ Xm. Morals 193 - XIV. Religion 213 XV. Overcrowds 242 XVI. War: Its Cause and Cure 265 XVn. The Contest of Ideals 285 XVIII. The Crowd at War 298 XIX. The Value of the Crowd 307 ^ XX. The Just Mean 318 ) THE CROWD IN PEACE AND WAR The Crowd in Peace and War CHAPTER I KINDS OF CROWDS MAN has never decided whether to be a gregarious animal or not. Individuahsm and sociahsm at- tract him alternately. He swings like a pendu- lum from the one to the other. At times he merges himself completely in some group or crowd and loses his identity there like a sheep in a flock. Then he lives and moves and has his being in the crowd. He follows its routine; esprit de corps determines his ideals and dictates his emo- tions. He is Uke a soldier in a regiment, or a cell in liv- ing tissue: a mere unit whose life, joy, and passion it is to contribute his portion of vitality and power to the larger life of the whole group, or as our brave soldiers say, "to do his bit." At other times man adopts the attitude of complete de- tachment from his fellows, like Thoreau at Walden, or a Theban hermit in his desert cave. The crowd then is nothing to him. His aim is to be self-sufficing — to think his own thoughts, go his own ways, provide for his own needs, and perhaps save his own soul. He no longer resembles a sheep in a flock or a wolf in a pack, but re- The Crowd in Peace and War mains aloof, like some lonely condor circling in the blue, with even the high Andes far beneath him, and his nearest fellow, visible only to vision keen as his, Ukewise isolated miles away in the depths of the air. Much has in recent years been written about the Crowd and its psychology, yet for the most part from quite re- stricted points of view, as if the only Crowds to be con- sidered were but two, — the Mob and the Pubhc : the Mob as any disorganised or weakly organised assemblage of people; the Public as what we all know and need not define, the general body of inhabitants of a given area organised mostly by newspapers. Yet there are many other crowds to which an individual may belong beside these two, and it may serve to clear the ground if we con- sider a few of them briefly. To begin with there are what we ordinarily designate as crowds: that is to say assemblages of human beings, all physically present together at one time and within one area, each individual conscious of the presence of the next. A mob is the least admired form of such a crowd, the term usually implying not merely the simul- taneous presence of a number of people, but that their behaviour is more or less disorderly. A pubhc meeting is usually a well-behaved crowd, but may at any time degenerate into a mob; it is to a large extent a chance assembly of people who have never come together in their entirety before and will never assemble again, the link between them being therefore felt to be of a transitory kind. A theatre audience is of like character in con- stitution, but differs from a public meeting in that it assembles for another end and knows what it expects to i Kinds of Crowds experience. DijBFerent again is a congregation and on a higher plane both of organisation and purpose; whilst a regiment on parade is likewise and obviously another and more elaborately organised assemblage. More important for the purposes of our present scru- tiny are the groups of human beings not physically assem- bled together within sight and hearing of one another at any time and place, yet forming collective bodies which have a separate and conscious existence. Them also, for brevity and convenience' sake, one may hkewise designate as crowds. Such are the Race, the Empire, the Nation, each possessing consciousness of a separate exist- ence and an internal unity. Even the English-speaking race, vaguely definable though it be, really exists as a true crowd and knows that it has a certain separate life apart from the other races that fill the world. Its life is no doubt a very low form, its self -consciousness weak, but if it realised that an attempt were being made by any other race to supplant it, it would defend its existence with vigour. Some Empires are more self-conscious be- cause more highly organised than others, but even one whose organisation is as rudimentary as that of Great Britain is capable of manifesting amazing crowd- life when attacked — a statement which to-day needs no emphasis. The next geographically limited crowd-unit is the Nation, which, though it may include elements of various races, is yet more vital and more self-conscious, because more highly organised, than they can be. Na- tions, in fact, are the largest organised crowds that exist. It is an exception to find an individual citizen of any nation whose citizenship is not a strong element in his 5 The Crowd in Peace and War individual character and a determining factor in many of the most important actions of his hfe. Every citizen of a nation carries the national type about with him. It has been wittily said of the insular Briton that "every English- man is an island." Mr. Justice Darling retorted that "every American is a continent." The national charac- ter finds queer ways of expressing itself in some indi- viduals, but in almost all it is at any rate present in the form called Patriotism. Patriotism is the emotion of his national crowd in the heart of the individual citizen. Besides, or rather contained within, a nation are many smaller crowds geographically defined. The people of a county are a crowd; more consciously are those of a city or town. The inhabitants of a village or parish often feel themselves to be a separate crowd with a crowd-life and consciousness of their own. Further divisions and sub-divisions might be catalogued, but let the foregoing suffice, not for definition but for illustration. A geographical limitation is only one of the possible circumscriptions of a crowd. The most notable organised crowds within a nation are political parties, and their Kfe is full of vigour, though they are not geographically de- fined. Classes are likewise crowds, some more self-con- scious than others, but all to some extent possessed of the elements of a separate being. "Labour" nowadays has become keenly conscious of its separate crowd-life; "Society" is likewise thus conscious, but less keenly. The various professions have a crowd-life more or less self- conscious. Medical practitioners, for instance, form a group with a strong independent life and a high internal organisation. The body of lawyers is only a Httle less Kinds of Crowds vigorous in its group-life than the body of medical men, and other professions congregate apart in a descending order of vitality. It is possible or even probable that two rat-catchers, otherwise strangers, might feel them- selves linked by a bond which would stand some shght strain if the occasion arose to put it to the test. Ecclesiastical and religious bodies of all kinds are crowds, often highly organised and keenly conscious of their separate existence. The sub-divisions of a Church, the High Churchmen, the Evangelicals, and so forth, are no less ahve, and parishes have a vitality of their own which is not the same as that of a given congregation at any moment assembled for worship. Clubs and Societies are crowds, sometimes loosely organised and scarcely conscious at all, sometimes highly organised and keenly self-conscious. More vigorous than most in their crowd- consciousness are the educational organisations: schools, colleges, universities, the actual members of which in the heyday of their career are perhaps more sensible of their membership of the collective body to which they belong than of any other circumstance of their existence. Most highly organised of all is a disciplined regiment of soldiers (not merely when on parade), which is con- structed, drilled, and in every detail of life ordained to the end that the unit may be completely merged in the whole and, as far as can possibly be attained, may lose all individual will, feeling, fear, or independence, and be- come one in act, in thought, and above all things in emo- tion — in what we call es-prit de corps — with the body of which he for the time being forms a part. These and the Uke aggregations of men possess the 7 The Crowd in Peace and War crowd quality, but we regard them with different degrees of admiration or sympathy. It is with human crowds as with groups of animals; some are regarded as superior to others. Thus, for instance, what we think of a hive of bees, a flock of sheep, a pack of wolves, is shown by the way we use the same terms when apphed to men. We speak of a "hive of industry," of a Parson and his "flock," of a "pack of fools," thereby indicating admiration of the bees, sympathy for the sheep, and contempt for the wolves. So the word "Mob" implies contempt and hatred of the thing, and for other groups we have dif- ferent grades of esteem. It will be found that the meas- ure of those grades depends not so much on the degree of organisation of the crowd as on the ideal by which it is animated. A multitude of people walking in the street, each about his own busuiess, may form a dense mass of humanity, but they are not a crowd imtil something occurs to arrest their common attention and inspire in them a common emotion. Any sudden danger or startling event suffices to bring them into the first rudimentary crowd-relation with one another. A horse falls and people gather round; a couple of vehicles collide and a more interested crowd collects; a house catches fire and the neighbourhood is filled with an excited throng. Such crowds, till the police take them in hand, are altogether disorganised, and rapidly degenerate into mobs. That fact is so well realised that the police have been trained in every coun- try as rudimentary crowd-organisers, and do the work almost as well as it can be done, on the spur of the mo- ment. These chance assemblages, collected by any Kinds of Crowds accident, do not, however, long remain passive if events of interest confront them. In the case of a fire, for in- stance, something is sure to occur that will kindle their passions. The mere event excites them. Soon they become vocal. By shouting they further excite one another. They are sure to be warmly sympathetic; they will cheer the smallest act of courage; they will also be profoundly sentimental, as is shown for example if women or children are imperilled. There is no present need to elaborate what every one knows. A band of music is the easiest of all agencies, not merely for bringing a crowd together but for kindling the emotion that provides it at once with a rudimentary structure and a common emotion. Men marching be- hind a band in rhythmic step are already beginning to crystallize into an integral group. They feel as one and move as one so long as the music holds them. Hence the efficiency of a band as a military recruiting agency and a stimulus to the regiment when formed. A band, says Mr. Kipling, "revives memories and quickens " associations; it opens and unites the hearts of men more "surely than any other appeal ... A wise and sym- " pathetic bandmaster . . . can lift a battalion out of "depression, cheer its sickness, and steady and recall "it to itself in times of almost unendurable strain." Religious revivalists long ago realised the value of music as an aid to their propaganda. Years ago Moody and Sankey made music an important part of their spec- tacular assemblies. Later came Torrey and Alexander, likewise from America, and this is what one of them said to a "Daily Mail" reporter. "There has never been a 9 The Crowd in Peace and War great revival without music. Hymns prepare the ground for the exhortation of the preacher. Business men come to the meetings full of their worries and cares, and in no state of mind to derive the fullest bene- fit from spoken lessons and advice. A swinging hymn makes them forget all their troubles. Half an hour of bright revival hymns kneads the congregation into one body. It is possible to end the musical part of the service too early, and it is always my aim to get every member of the congregation to sing before the hymns are finished. . . . Unanimous congregational singing is of the utmost value in a revival." The arts of crowd- management could scarcely be better illustrated. The oldest and still the most powerful crowd-former is the orator; that in fact is the purpose for which oratory exists. It was formed in the presence of crowds and developed by the reaction of crowd and speaker on one another. A man with an oratorical gift can swiftly con- vert a chance assemblage into a crowd. We see this accomplished not infrequently in the public streets. A speaker stands at some corner and begins his harangue. At first he is like a fallen cab-horse; a few folk stop out of idle curiosity rather to look at him than to listen. He says something that catches their attention, and they lose the listless attitude of the mere loafer. Others are thereby attracted to join them. The speaker begins to take hold of them. He makes them laugh; he draws forth their applause. They become the centre of a continually widening assembly. At first the speaker's ideas are nothing to them. Presently they become interested; be- fore long they are taken captive. The orator mesmer- ic Kinds of Crowds ises rather than convinces them. They shout applause and their enthusiasm is kindled. They become a group with an idea, and in the heat of that emotion they may be led to act in a remarkable manner, as the individuals composing the group could never have been brought to act had they been reasoned with, one by one, by ever so many separate archangels. Evangehstic revival meetings present these phenom- ena in a well-recognised form. Here, for instance, is a cutting from a recent American newspaper, describing the feats of "Billy" Sunday. "Philadelphia, Jan. 24, 1915. "All records for a day's quota of trail-hitters were broken "to-day when 1,445 men, among them ex-Sheriff David "Baird, the old Republican boss of Camden, walked up "the sawdust-covered aisles of the Tabernacle, at Nine- "teenth and Vine Streets, took Billy Sunday by the hand " and told him that they accepted Christ as their Saviour. "Never in nearly twenty years of evangelism has he " accomplished such results as these in a single day. Five "hundred and twenty-three were converted at the night "service after the most spectacular platform performance "to which the evangelist has treated Philadelphia since "his arrival in the city." The audiences at such meetings are brought together as a crowd that watches a fire is formed, by the mere desire to be present at an event. They come to see something happen. The spell-binder gets hold of them, just as a mesmerist attracts examples from his audience, and causes them to provide the very sight they came to see. It is sometimes easy to note the moment when a chance 11 The Crowd in Peace and War assembly becomes an integral crowd, possessed by a com- mon emotion which swamps and obliterates the individual mind. Thus, for instance, I myself was present a good many years ago in the smoking-room of an Atlantic liner, when the usual daily auction-sale was taking place of the numbers drawn for the pool on the count of miles run in the current twenty-four hours. It was the first day out, and the smoking-room assemblage had scarcely begun to be conscious of itself. The auctioneer was not very eloquent and sales were slow; bids of from £l to £2 were obtained with difficulty. Several numbers had been thus sold and the next in order was offered. There was nothing special in the nature of the chances to make it more desir- able than its predecessors, but for some obscure reason the room woke up. Something was said by the auctioneer that raised a laugh; some repartee came from the room. A wave of emotion swept through the men present; they suddenly became a crowd. Bids followed one another in rapid succession. An atmosphere of excitement and speculation was created, and the number was knocked down for £52, when its despised predecessor had fetched but thirty shillings. Frequenters of other kinds of auc- tions could recall similar experiences. Prices are as often determined by mere crowd-enthusiasm as by the cold value of the things disposed of. A great deal of art may be employed by the managers of a public assembly to induce, in the people present, the kind of sudden overwhelming enthusiasm of which large bodies of men are capable, such enthusiasm, however created, being afterwards a valuable asset to a movement, and often, as we shall hereafter see, leaving permanent 12 Kinds of Crowds traces upon the individuals who were affected by it. Let me cite an illustration from the United States — the country far excellence of crowds. Perhaps the most remarkable American crowds present at one time in the flesh, whose doings are carefully put on record, are the great Conventions of the two chief pohtical parties, which assemble once every four years to nominate a candidate for the Presidency and perform various other functions. Such a convention was that of the Democratic Party, which assembled in Kansas City in the early days of July, 1900, and nominated Mr. Bryan. I select it because I was interested at the time in its behaviour and preserved the records which now lie before me. I select merely one incident therefrom to illustrate how a crowd's en- thusiasm may be organised by wily leaders. The moment came when the report of the Committee on Platform was to be read. The Platform to be thus presented was that upon which the party were to appeal to the country, and, of course, it was the purpose of such a document to arouse enthusiasm. Senator James K. Jones of Arkansas was Chairman of the Committee and should in the ordinary course have read the report to the Convention. "Senator Jones has," said the reporter of the New York "Sun," "a very sturdy voice himself, but he announced that Senator "Ben T illm an would read the committee's report. Senator "T illm an has a voice like a wagon running over a corduroy road. "He seemed to have committed that report to memory. He "certainly delivered it in splendid fashion. He made every "possible point tell. When Senator Tillman came to the words "that 'Imperiahsm is the paramount issue of this campaign,' "there were only a few cheers. Senator Tillman looked up sur- 13 The Crowd in Peace and War 'prised. Then he turned to Chairman Richardson and then to 'Senator Jones. Then he looked at Sergeant-at-Arms John S. 'Martin. Something was amiss. Something had gone wrong. 'Mr. Martin waved his arms in his excitement. He weighs '300 pounds. He jumped down from his perch on the platform on to the gangway running before the platform and danced 'about in anger. The ushers and messengers were quickly 'around him. There was a hurried confabulation and Mr. 'Martin swung his head and his arms back towards Senator Tillman upon the platform. The messengers and ushers 'darted here and there among the delegates and a hundred of 'other messengers and ushers rushed up into the galleries. All 'were loaded with American flags. They quietly distributed these flags among the delegates and the audience. In a jiffy 'Mr. Martin waved his arms up at the band and it quickly came 'out with the 'Star Spangled Banner.' Even then there was no demonstration. Senator Tillman tiu-ned full face to the 'audience and roared with all his might, 'I say again that Im- ' 'perialism is the paramount issue of this campaign.' The band, 'which had halted a moment, came out again with the 'Star ' ' Spangled Banner.' The delegates and the audience unfolded 'their flags. A great flag which was hung from the steel trusses 'of the convention haU just over the platform was dropped. 'This was the legend upon it: 'The Constitution and the "flag, one and inseparable, now and forever; the flag of the ' ' republic forever, of an empire never.' "Then came one of the greatest scenes that this convention 'has had. Upon all the little flags which the himdreds of mes- 'sengers and ushers had distributed were printed the exact 'words on the big flag which had been let down from the trusses. 'The audience roared with enthusiasm. The delegates grasped 'their standards and swung them over their heads. Half a 'dozen banners were waved in the air. One of them read: 'Lincoln abolished slavery under the flag. McKinley restored 14 Kinds of Crowds " 'it.' Another read: 'What would Christ do in the Philippines?' "And still another read: 'No man is good enough to govern " ' another man without his consent. A. Lincoln.' Amid the "tumultuous cheers the band was heard playing 'There'll Be a " ' Hot Time in the Old Town to-night.' The delegates began to "carry their standards around the hall. The flags, thousands "upon thousands of them, were waving, and it was a vast scene "of coloTU'. The cheers were riotous. High above them could "be heard the rebel yell, 'Hi, hi, hi, hi, ki, ki, ki!' The Boer "flag was brought out and toted around the hall, and the band "played America's greatest national anthem, 'My Country, "'tis of Thee,' which, as all know, from time immemorial has "been set to the music of 'God Save the Queen.' It was a wild "scene. It was a pathetic scene to some who had observed "closely the fact that this was a cut-and-dried afl'air, which had "come almost near failure. It was not a spontaneous outburst "for the flag. It had been worked up by the managers of this "convention. The demonstration lasted twelve minutes. Many "who saw it will never forget it." A crowd, in the sense in which I am employing the word, can be formed in a hundred other ways than by mere physical presence together at one time and place. Printing, the telegraph, and the various modern inven- tions and developments we are all familiar with, have made crowd-formation possible without personal con- tact, as they have also made the gathering together of an actual assembly far more easy to accomplish than it was when the best form of advertisement was the town-crier. What is a "movement" but the formation of a crowd? Public meetings and the like agencies may be employed to initiate it, but in the miaia it is not by meetings but by the printed word that the movement is spread and 15 The Crowd in Peace and War the crowd of its adherents enlisted. Nowadays we are all of us crowd-assailed at any hour and in all places. Clubs, associations, organisations for every purpose cease- lessly call upon each to join. "Come unto us and we "with you will be potent; come unto us and share our "emotion; come unto us and accomplish together some "heart's desire." Every newspaper, every magazine, innumerable agencies intrude upon the individual and would swallow him up, would capture his life into that of their larger composite, would make of his voice a trumpet for their own creed or aspiration. What indeed are newspapers but crowd-formers, and the habitual readers of a newspaper but a crowd? Newspapers indeed are read by individuals, just as individual ears hear the voice of an orator, but they are not addressed to individuals, nor does a reader read them in the same attitude of mind as when he reads a private letter. A newspaper reader is conscious of his crowd as he reads; he is a Tory or a Liberal or whatnot, and it is as such that he is addressed and as such that he reads. A newspaper is as much con- ceived and produced for a crowd as is any orator's har- angue. The story is told how an old journalist said to a young one, "Remember when you are writing for your "paper that you are like a man shouting from a fourth- " floor window to a crowd passing in the street." The purpose of journalism is, in fact, crowd-formation and crowd-direction, and though journals incidentally serve the needs of individuals in many minor ways, they do not exist for the individual but for some crowd which it is their aim to direct. Religion has been a potent crowd-forming agency. The 16 Kinds of Crowds most remarkable example in the world's history is the religion of Islam. It was born in the heart and brain of Mahommed, and within a hundred years after the FUght it had welded its adherents into a victorious host, which, sweeping forth from the sparsely-peopled deserts of Arabia, had conquered and held Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain. In our own day the followers of that quaint prophetess, Mrs. Eddy, are already counted by milUons, and though they have not gone forth conquering and to conquer, it is certain that they are a powerful body. The philosophy of the notori- ous Treitschke within the lifetime of a generation has remade the Grerman people on a new model and threat- ened the whole basis of European civilisation; had it not been for the power of organising resistance quickly and over a large area, provided by modern means of intercourse and commimication, we might have witnessed at the present moment a German repetition of the suc- cesses of conquering Islam. The German-Turkish alli- ance is not so surprising as seems to have been generally thought, for Islam and Teutonism have much in common. A new political theory is scarcely less efficient as a crowd- former. Who could have supposed when Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, and a few others began their onslaught upon the "Condition of England" that within little more than half a century the axis of politics would have been shifted so completely as it has been in consequence of the new ideas to which they gave expression? The Labour Party in England to-day perhaps owes more to the writings of Ruskin than to any other impulse. After the election of 1905, when numerous Labour Members obtained entry 17 The Crowd in Peace and War into the House of Commons, a newspaper had the good idea to inquire of them what books read by them had had any considerable effect on them. Many replied that their reading was mainly confined to newspapers, but a large proportion also stated that they had read Raskin's "Time and Tide" and dated much of their activity from that reading. Philanthropic movements can form large and efficient crowds, as was seen for example in the anti-slavery agi- tation. The temperance movement has produced vigor- ous crowds, and so on a smaller scale have such agitations as those which protest against vaccination, typhoid- innoculation, vivisection, and so forth. These and other like movements avail themselves of public meetings for their propaganda, but the crowds they form and by which they exist are mainly collected by means of the news- paper press. Orators provide the nucleus, but it is the press that builds up the crowd and cements its organisa- tion. In that "dark backward and abysm of time," when palseohthic man alone foreshadowed the human race which was to come, it is safe to assert that there were no crowds or only very small and rudimentary ones. Palaeo- lithic man was a hunter or a root digger. His awk- ward flint weapons were useful only at arm's length. He must have lain in wait for his prey, silently in secret places. Probably each family supplied its own needs and lived apart; but a family is not a crowd and possesses none of the qualities and peculiarities of a crowd. Asser- tions on unrecorded happenings in so remote a past are vain, but we can at least imagine a strong probability 18 Kinds of Crowds that individualism was never more pronounced than in the earUest stages of human development. When, however, we come to neoHthic man we are evi- dently in the presence of crowds. Neolithic man lived in communities, had invented agriculture, and had sub- jugated a certain number of domestic animals. The palaeolithic famUy was replaced by the neolithic tribe. If Adam and Eve before the Fall were palaeolithic indi- viduals, the Tree of Knowledge which caused them to till the ground turned them into social units. Thence- forward the internal struggle went on, between man the individual and man the crowd-unit, which has lasted down to the present day and will continue until civilisa- tion atrophies. It is in this rivalry between individual instincts and social claims that sin finds its origin, so that a profound truth underlies the legend of the birth of sin accompanying the introduction of agriculture in conse- quence of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. An important element in the forces that promote crowd- formation is the attractiveness of a crowd for the indi- vidual. The ordinary man is as inevitably drawn toward a crowd as a needle toward a magnet. When Pickwick was being carried to the magistrate's house, accompanied by a shouting crowd, Sam Weller "stepped aside to see "the crowd pass, and fiinding that they were cheering "away, very much to their own satisfaction, forthwith "began to cheer too, with all his might and main," being of course entirely ignorant of his master's predicament or the cause of the cheering. The moment a number of people are seen to be assembling in a street for any or no visible reason, others will run to join them, and the larger 19 The Crowd in Peace and War the crowd the more powerful the attraction it exercises. The mere expectation that any announced meeting will be large tends to make it so. The knowledge that a movement is growing tends to increase its growth. Why do newspapers announce the extent of their circulation? It is because their audience is a crowd and attracts others to itself the more powerfully the larger it is said to be. Enthusiasm has a tendency to spread and a crowd is the agency, a larger crowd the result, of such spreading. A large school, a large university, is more attractive to most students than a small one. The smaller body may even provide a better education, but the larger invests its members with a greater corporate pride. Attractiveness is, in fact, an element of vitahty possessed by all crowds. I cut from an American newspaper (the "Tribune," I believe) an excellent story about the behaviour on a certain occasion of the boys in a school chapel. It illus- trates the ease with which a crowd of lads accustomed to a common life can be moved to act as a unit by even a slight common impulse. The preacher, on the occasion in question, "was not of the sturdy sort that college men "take to at the first glance, and he had a lisp in his voice "that the audience tried politely to forget. Although "he did not have a particularly strong sermon, it would "have 'passed by,' in campus language, if he had not "chosen some particularly childish stories with which to "illustrate his text. During the rendition of these the "undergraduates grew more and more restless, until the "climax came. He finished his sermon with the point "that 'weak human beings have to be assisted to cUmb "'the "ladder of life,"' a point that would not have had 20 (C (( M Kinds of Crowds 'the effect on the audience that it did had it not been 'accompanied by the illustration. This illustration was 'of a boy whom the preacher named 'Willie,' which was 'enough to focus all the eyes in the chapel on him at once. "Willie,' said the preacher, 'had to climb the stairs to get ' ' a paper of pins for mamma, and mamma was at the bot- "tom of the stairs to encourage him. "Now, Willie," "said mamma, "you go up the stairs and mamma will "count for you."' "The undergraduates squirmed in their seats at this, 'and looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes. " ' "Now, Willie," said mamma, " count the steps. One two — three," and Willie counted "One — two — three.'" 'Four — five' The students had caught 'Willie's enthusiasm by this time, and began to count with 'the preacher, half audibly at first, and then, as the spirit ' of the thing took them, louder and louder — ' Four — "five — six!' In less time than it takes to tell it the 'twelve hundred undergraduates were counting with the 'preacher, who, although decidedly aghast at the com- ' motion he had caused, had to continue. 'Eight — nine " — ten!' at the end of which the preacher in unison with 'the entire chapel said, 'And Willie — got — the — 'pins!'" What is the minimum number of individuals that can form a crowd.'* It is not an unimportant question, seeing that individuals and crowds act on quite different motives, individuals being directed in the main by reason, crowds by emotion. Is a Jury, for instance, a crowd or a mere group of individuals? Is a Cabinet a crowd? These are questions of importance, for they lie at the root of 21 The Crowd in Peace and War modern systems of law and government. An essential quality of an embodied crowd I take to be that its numbers are too large for general conversation to be possible. As soon as such a group comes under the control of an orator it is a crowd. The essence of con- versation is interruption, the power and right of an individual to break in upon another's monologue. Con- versation is essentially a process of give and take. Its life is gone the moment one individual takes the floor and silences the rest. I believe it was the poet Rogers who wittily said that the number at a dinner party should be less than the Muses and more than the Graces. Where, more than nine people are assembled about a table the danger of crowd-formation arises. Three or less are not a party at all. It is possible for each of a party of nine to retain a definite consciousness of the separate personali- ties and characters of the other eight, and to address his remarks to each with a personal quality in what he says, but few will be able to retain such consciousness of a larger number; the moment the speaker loses that conscious- ness of each person's iadividuality he will find himself either talking to his neighbour privately or addressing the table as if it were a meeting. Some torrential talkers treat their audience always as if it were an assemblage. Such was the late Mr. Gladstone. For him a single individual might seem to be a crowd. "He talks to me," said Queen Victoria, "as though I were a public meeting." As a matter of fact a sovereign is a kind of crowd, or should be, as we shall hereafter note; but Queen Victoria was the last person to realise this. Experience proves that a Jury of twelve does in fact 22 Kinds of Crowds act as a crowd, and it is probable that that number has been in process of time arrived at because it is the mini- mum number that can be normally relied upon so to act. As a rule the general feeling among a dozen men suffices to carry them all along together to a common conclusion. Now and again a sturdy individualist may turn i^ amongst the dozen and the result be disagreement, but such occasions are exceptional. A modern English Cabinet is likewise certainly a crowd, though the small governuig committees of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries out of which it has been developed were not. Hence in our day has arisen that new and quite unconstitutional feature, the inner Cabinet, of whose structure and doings the public is fortunately so little informed. Executive Committees, whether for the gov- ernment of a nation or of a cricket club, can never in fact be crowds, or, if they are, they cease to be executive. A large committee is of necessity inefficient unless it in practice delegates its functions to a single individual and makes him despotic. I was once a member of a Com- mittee of some two or three score members, whose busi- ness it was to decide a question of taste in relation to a proposed public building. We met once and once only, and that meeting was the ineptest I have ever attended. To take counsel with sixty is not possible. Half a dozen talked at once. No one could at the same time get at the plans and show to the rest what he objected to. After two or three hours of wild discussion one man, with no pretensions whatever to taste, but having a strong view as to what should be done in the interest of his own de- partment, imposed himself upon the confused welter of The Crowd in Peace and War discordant minds. He had the loudest voice and could hold out against the attractions of lunch longer than any of the others. His statements were clear, his resolution cut and dried, and eventually the majority yielded. One of the ugliest of modern pubUc buildings was the result. If you want Parthenons, or Cathedrals like Rheims, that is not the way to get them. A crowd cannot take counsel. It can only listen to competing leaders and accept one of them. Where the purpose to be attained cannot so be arrived at, a crowd is impotent and should not to that end have been called into being. 24 CHAPTER II THE NATURE OF CROWDS ILLUSTRATING by concrete examples rather than defining, we have thus far endeavoured to show the kmd of human aggregations to which the word "crowd" may be applied, and the kind of process by which such crowds are called into existence. It is now time to examine the nature of such crowds and of the individuals composing them, and to consider how their internal organisation is accomplished and with what results. It is urged by some that a crowd is to be regarded as a separate living entity, a being with a beginning, a life, and a death of its own. A crowd is not, as most old writers used to assume it to be, either the sum or the average of the individuals composing it, but is wholly different in kind from those individuals — as different as is an animal from the cells of which the tissue of its body is built up. Radical politicians in the days of the Reform Bill asserted that the proposed extension of the suffrage would bring to the counsels of the nation a multitude of judgments arrived at by as many individual minds, each guided by a consideration of individual interests. The normal voter was imagined to be a person who, whether foolishly or wisely, thought out for himself, with the assistance of the speeches and writings of more experi- 25 The Crowd in Peace and War enced persons, what his interests at the moment were in relation to legislation proposed, and voted accordingly. But we know by experience that the ordinary voter does nothing of the kind, and the managers of all political parties alike take care that he shall not. The ordinary voter merely catches the momentary passion of one of the parties in the political campaign and off he goes shouting, betting on the result, and finally voting, in much the same attitude of mind as that of the supporters of one side or the other in a great football-match. The opinion of a crowd has no relation to the reasoned opinion of the majority of its members, but is a mere infectious passion which sweeps through the whole body like an electric current, and frequently is originated and propagated from a single brain. Once a crowd is really formed, once the members of it have fallen under one another's mesmerism, "the individual withers and the" crowd "is more and more," the individual is in fact absorbed for the time being into the crowd and merely contributes his life to the vitality of the collective body. Thus, in the excitement of a battle, the soldier is wont to lose the sense of his individuality so completely as sometimes to be unconscious of a severe wound. He is entirely absorbed into the crowd. Hence his loss of the fear that is so commonly felt by soldiers on the eve of battle. Losing himseK he loses the desire of self-preserva- tion, and fear only comes upon him when the structure of his crowd is broken up and panic sets in. The typical coward is an unmesmerisable person, one who cannot merge his individuality into the crowd, but retains always the sense of self and with it the desire of seK-preservation. 26 The Nature of Crowds Such a person, in face of an enemy, feels himself to be one against a thousand and is afraid. Few individuals can face a hostile crowd without fear. A woman feels herself to be in this position as against the mass of men, hence her constitutional and proper timidity. The really brave man is he who can fearlessly face a multitude alone; but such men are rare. Commonplace bravery is mere loss of individuahty in a fighting crowd. Hence the purpose of regimental organisation to integrate the units and strengthen the regiment's power of absorption. The kind of man who cannot be thus absorbed is the constitutional coward. He is an undesirable unit whose tendency is to disintegrate the crowd in which he is placed. He should be gotten rid of, but why should he be shot.'' It is a weak- ness of universal compulsory military service that it must sweep together into the ranks many such undesirables, who may be good enough human material nevertheless, but not for fighting purposes. Terror, has no imifying force. Terror scatters; pluck unites. Hence the crowd-sung prestige of bravery and the crowd-contemmed disgrace of fear. Courage is the highest crowd-virtue, because it makes for the crowd's success. Fear is the worst of crowd vices, because it makes for crowd-disintegration. But should individuals neces- sarily share these judgments? Cunning and foresight or prudence may be as efficient in preserving the life of an individual as pluck; indeed they may be more efficient. It is by them that women have oftenest preserved their offspring. But cunning in a man is not a crowd virtue. It was the virtue of the weakly organised people of the hunting stage, and in modern life it is the main virtue of 27 The Crowd in Peace and War the criminal classes, who are survivals of prehistoric men. Cunning and lack of cohesion characterise the criminal — a thorough individualist. But cunning is not iofectious. It does not inspire a crowd. It has no co-ordinating effect. Pluck is infectious. The truly brave man, who never loses his head but remains under all circumstances fully self-commanded, never fails to inspire a like power in his comrades to a greater or less extent. His virtue is the most precious of all to a crowd, and his reputation (that is to say the crowd's opinion of him) stands highest of all. The difference in character between a crowd and the individuals composing it leaps to the eye the moment the crowd is regarded dispassionately by a cool and de- tached observer. Note, for example, the different way in which a very small joke will appeal to an individual and to a crowd. What would scarcely raise a smile when spoken to an individual will raise roars of laughter from a crowd. A sentiment which, addressed to an individual, would seem the feeblest platitude will be received by an audience with rounds of applause. Here is a concrete instance. Mr. Asquith, on the 2d of October, 1914, addressed a most important meeting at the Guildhall of the City of London on the causes of the Great War. In the course of his speech he made the following very simple remarks in reference to the modern German dogma that "force is the test and measure of right": — "It is one of those products of German genius which, "whether or not it was intended exclusively for home "consumption, has, I am happy to say, not found a market "abroad, and certainly not within the boundaries of the 28 The Nature of Crowds "British Empire. We still believe here, old-fashioned "people as we are, in the sanctity of treaties, that the "weak have rights, and that the strong have duties," — and so forth. It is aU sound common sense, clearly ex- pressed, but the reader who has this moment perused these words has certainly not been moved to laughter by them in his comfortable arm-chair, nor has his enthusiasm been so kindled as to make him stamp about the room or otherwise provide any muscular discharge for his feehngs. Here, however, from the "Times" report, is the effect of these same words upon an unusually superior audience, intellectually far above the level of an ordinary public meeting : — "It is one of those products of German genius which, whether or not it was intended exclusively for home consumption, — {Laughter) — has, I am happy to say, not f oimd a market abroad, — {Cheers) — and certainly not within the boundaries of the British Empire. {Re- newed cheers.) We still believe here, old-fashioned people as we are, — {Laughter) — in the sanctity of treaties, — {Cheers) — that the weak have rights, and that the strong have duties, and small nationalities have every bit as good a title as large ones to life and independence, and that freedom for its own sake is as well worth fight- ing for to-day as it ever was in the past — {Cheers) and we look forward at the end of this war to a Europe in which these great and simple and venerable truths will be recognised and safeguarded for ever against the recrudescence of the era of blood and iron. {Cheers.)" It is with reluctance that I dwell upon the phenomena of the nattu-e of the crowd, as they have been frequently 29 The Crowd in Peace and War discussed of late years, especially by French and Italian writers, but all my readers may not be alike familiar with what to some will be commonplace. Amongst English writers Mr. A. B. Walkley, in his capacity of theatrical critic, has perhaps described the crowd-nature most plainly as manifested by theatre audiences. "A "crowd," he said in his evidence before the Censorship Committee, "is a new entity, differing in mind and will 'from the individuals who compose it. Its intellectual 'pitch is lowered, its emotional pitch raised. It takes 'on something of the characteristics of a hypnotized "subject.' It tends to be irrational, excitable, lacking 'in self-control. Many Frenchmen under the Terror, 'gentle and humane as individuals, made up crowds 'guilty of horrible atrocities. Questioned afterwards, 'they could not account for their actions. Some inex- 'plicable change had taken place in them, and that 'inexplicable something was the influence of the crowd. 'A theatrical audience has the peculiar psychology of 'the crowd. An offensive play, performed before it, has 'an entirely different effect from that which the play 'would have if read separately and privately by each 'individual. The crowd is the controlling factor in the 'matter. That, I submit, is the real justification for 'retaining a Theatrical Censorship." On another occasion (14th Dec, 1903), the same writer affirmed that all persons "belonging to a crowd "descended several rungs of the ladder of civihsation." Mobs, as we know, thus descend. So do other forms of crowd. Here is what a correspondent of the "Times" says about the Russians: — 30 The Nature of Crowds " I suppose it may seem strange that a kindly man, such as I have pictured the Russian soldier, can be as ferocious in attack as he certainly is. Indeed, it is hard to reconcile the characteristics of gentleness and mildness and good humour with the hideous fury into which men work them- selves in battle. The psychology of war is such, however, that not only with the Russians, but, I think, with all men in the tumult and chaos of action, the characteristics of the individuals are merged into the quite foreign per- sonahty of the mass itself. Individuals who by them- selves are the mildest of men, become transformed in action into creatures whose own individuaUty is utterly lost. Once the action is over, these same individuals will minister to the needs and agonies of their prisoners with as much gentleness and sympathy as to men of their own race." Mr. Moreton Frewen's observations on the German crowd indicate that it descends, as common opinion now realises, to a lower level than that of any other civilised European nation. "The more we read German history," he says, "the more we discover that the German nature "aggregates dangerously; that the tendency of any "German crowd is to be worse than its units. It cannot "fairly be said that we English are only now finding this "out at a time when instead of being the ally of Germany "we are her enemy. Look at what the Duke of Welling- "ton wrote to his mother in 1807 (Maxwell's 'Life of "'Wellington'): 'I can assure you that from the General "'of the Germans down to the smallest drummer boy in "'their legion the earth never groaned under such a set "'of murdering, infamous villains. They murdered, 31 The Crowd in Peace and War '"robbed and ill treated the peasantry wherever they '"went."' "The late General Grierson, who commanded our troops "at the relief of the foreign embassies, at Pekin, told me "that the infamies perpetrated by the Germans on these "helpless Chinese were such that he could never again "break bread with a German. The soldiers of the "American expeditionary force must be equally aware "of this." The fundamental reason why a collective body of human beings differs toto ccelo from so many individuals is because no two individuals can ever think alike, whilst any number can feel ahke. Quot homines tot sententiae is proverbial truth. Witness the hopeless struggles of generations of churchmen to state simple dogmas in plain words so as to be universally acceptable, and the ultimate necessity to which they were driven to compel acceptance of formulae by force and to wink at individual freedom of personal interpretation of the actual words and phrases. But no such difficulty arises in connexion with feelings and passions. The Germans were able to unite very completely in hating England, without need to quarrel about definitions of terms. Who wants a definition of love, of pride, of grief or joy.'' We can all unite without the smallest difficulty in such emotions, and moreover our union of feeling is a different kind of union from that which we describe as intellectual agreement. Union of feeling promotes, and flourishes in, a state of enthusiasm. It is like a mesmeric condition. It height- ens our sense of life; it carries us beyond the limitations of our intelligence; it takes us into another world, — 32 The Nature of Crowds higher or lower as the case may be, — but at any rate other than the world in which we normally exist. Hence it is that a crowd has all the emotions and no intellect. It can feel, but it cannot think. It has in common a subtle sensibility to feeling. Passion sweeps through it, but it can reason about nothing; for it has no reasoning apparatus in common. The nerves of all its members may certainly be in connection with one another, but not their thoughts. They can applaud or "boo" in common, but they cannot criticise or differen- tiate. Acceptance or rejection are their only alterna- tive; feeling can accomplish those operations with hardly any help from reason. "You can talk a mob into anything," wrote Ruskin ('Sesame,' p. 39), "its feehngs may be — usually are — on "the whole generous and right; but it has no foundation "for them, no hold of them; you rhay tease or tickle it "into any, at your pleasure; it thinks by infection for "the most part, catching an opinion Uke a cold, and there "is nothing so little that it will not roar itself wild about, "when the fit is on; — nothing so great but it will forget "in an hour, when the fit is past. But a gentleman's "... passions are just, measured, and continuous." Ancient writers long ago realised some of the qualities of the great pubhc crowd, but for the most part only its evil qualities. Here are a few citations which might be multiplied almost indefinitely: — Herodotus (iii 81) : wOeei (6 St^/ios) eiimcrmv TO. irp-qyiuira Sivev vov, )(eiiJ,a.ppcf TroTttju." txeXos. Livy (24. 25. 8). "Hsec est natura multitudinis; aut "humihter servit aut superbe dominatur." The Crowd in Peace and War Tacitus (Ann. i. 29): "Nihil in vulgo modicum; terrere "ni paveant; ubi pertimuerimt impune contemni." Sir Walter Raleigh: "The Multitude, wanting that "virtue which we call honesty in all men, and that es- "pecial gift of God we call charity, condemn without "hearing, wound without ofiEence given." Sir Thomas Roe, on the Indian pubUc in Mogul days: "The multitude, full of tumor and Noyce, without head " or foote; only it rages, but bendes it selfe upon noe direct "end." Such utterances are but superficial. All crowds, even those most suddenly and accidentally formed, possess the potentiality of good emotions as fully as of bad, and it is necessary to bear this continually in mind. A modem writer. Monsieur Tarde, by no means covers the whole ground when he says: "Si diverses qu'elles soient par 'leur origine, comme par tons leurs autres caracteres, 'les foules se ressemblent toutes par certains traits: leur intolerance prodigieuse, leur orgueil grotesque, leur susceptibilite maladive, le sentiment affolant de leur irresponsabihte ne de I'iUusion de la toute-puissance, et la perte totale du sentiment de la mesure qui tient a I'outrance de leurs emotions mutuellement exaltees. Entre I'execration et I'adoration, entre I'horreur et Tenthousiasme, entre les cris vive et a mort, il n'y a pas 'de milieu pour une foule. Vive, cela signifie vive a ja- 'mais. II y a la un souhait d'immortalite divine, un com- 'mencement d'apotheose. II suffit d'un rien pour changer 'la divinisation en damnation." All this is true, but also it is no less true that crowds may be generous, sympathetic, full of admiration for 34 The Nature of Crowds anything great or noble that they can feel, and of all manner of other admirable emotional exhibits. Crowds are neither good nor evil in the nature of things, but they may become either the one or the other. What a crowd can descend to was shown over and over again in the French Revolution. Their enthusiasm was even at the service of a Marat. "L'apotheose de ce monstre," continues the same writer, "le culte rendu a son 'coeur sacre,' expos6 au Pantheon, est un eclatant specimen de la puissance de mutuel aveuglement, de mutuelle hallucination, dont les hommes rassembles sont capables. Dans cet entralnement irresistible, la lachete a eu sa part, mais bien faible, en somme, et comme noyee dans la sincerite generale." If the virtues of a crowd arise from its emotions, their unmeasured character and the crowd's vices are the result of a lack of intelligence. As we have said, a crowd has no brain. It is foolish, therefore, to blame crowds for what they cannot help. The late Professor S. H. Butcher wrote: "A democratic society is inclined to do its thinking "by deputy, if only it is permitted to do its voting indi- "viduaUy. It is so easy to think in herds through Com- "mittees and Sub-Committees and party organisations. "To exercise the thinking power for its own sake is the "central idea of Academic studies. Suppress thinking "and you will be able to suppress freedom itself." That is, of course, perfectly true, but it is in the nature of things. A democratic society can no more think than it can go and study at a University, and the whole busi- ness of the modem world is to find out how best to do its thinking for it. 36 The Crowd in Peace and War A crowd is, in fact, like an explosive. It can easily be fired, and the result, if it is fired casually, is likely to be highly disastrous. It may even go off, as mobs do, by spontaneous ignition. On the other hand, its powers may be utilised to accomplish great ends, and have been so utilised throughout the ages in which civilisation has been slowly growing. For crowds are the nest and abid- ing place of ideals, and it has been by ideals that man has been raised from the level of the beast. A crowd lacks reason, but possesses faith. The ideals of a St. Francis, for instance, first form a crowd and then by it regenerate the world. In the succession of ideals has been the life of the human soul, and he who shall write the history of that succession, as no one has yet at- tempted to write it, will produce the story of the growth of humanity. Once an ideal has become incor- porated in a crowd, it must stand its trial in the great inquest of the world. If it be a right and noble ideal, the crowd prospers and spreads, engulfing more and more individuals and inspiring them, and through them the generations that are to follow. If it be a vile ideal, resistance will rise up against it and the crowd that is formed upon it will fail. The ideal of might is now upon its trial, and the world has risen up against it and said No! to it, and the crowd that is animated by it has not succeeded yet. When we have said this much we have really explained nothing; we have but stated the existence of certain phenomena which those who look can behold. The rela- tion of man to man is still a dark mystery which science has scarcely yet attempted to lighten. What is it that gives The Nature of Crowds to some by birthright the capacity of dominating others? Men in their crowd-relations are "such stuff as dreams "are made of." The drama, says Walkley, is a kind of hypnotic agency, "the mental state of a theatrical audi- "ence resembling that of a man in a dream, half-way be- "tween complete illusion and absolute non-illusion." What is the cause of this hypnotic condition? We talk vaguely of animal magnetism, without knowing that such a force exists. How does a brain send a message bidding the hand to close? Is the brain a battery and is the message in the nature of a telegram? Does man send out wireless messages without knowing it, and is there some unrecognised coherer in the make-up of other individuals that can receive them? Every one of us has at some time, the most phlegmatic perhaps only in their early youth, experienced the strange emotion of being raised out of his normal state into a condition of enthu- siasm which the ancients likened to intoxication, where- fore they cultivated Dionysiac Mysteries. What is it that happens in us at those times? Has it something to do with oiu- subconscious seK, if indeed there be such a thing as a subconscious self at all? This is a vague region into which Science is only beginning to search a way, but in that region, vague as you please but real none the less, the phenomena of the crowd are produced. There the forces exist by which it is swayed; there the dim consciousness it has of life; and it is there, when this unknown land shall have been penetrated by an explorer of genius, that the secrets of crowd-life and of much else that we long to understand may some day be revealed. One who, like the present writer, treads with doubtful 37 The Crowd in Peace and War balance on such giddy aretes, and finds his own way dif- ficult enough to trace in the high regions where philoso- phers dwell, will be wise if he decUnes to act as guide to others, but with them waits for a leader with keener sight and steadier foot to show him also the way. 38 CHAPTER III CROWD-UNITS HAVING briefly dealt with the crowd as a whole, let us now consider the condition of an individual man regarded as a crowd-unit. A man may join a crowd for all sorts of reasons, he may even be born into membership of it, but he only becomes an integral part of it by "catching its enthusiasm." The fact that we normally employ the word "catch" for this process is significant. A man Hkewise catches a disease, that is to say the infection enters him unperceived. Enthusi- asm is infectious. Reason has no part in its transfer from one to another. It descends as it were like a flame from heaven, or it rises as an exhalation from the pit. No one knows whence it cometh or whither it goeth. " So is every one that is born of the spirit." Every crowd has a crowd-spirit and every true member of a crowd catches that spirit. To go into a crowd is like going into a cholera-village; the man who does so puts himself in the way of infection. The persistent reader of a given newspaper runs the chance of presently finding himself one of its crowd. The man who goes to a revival meet- ing may find himseK at the stool of repentance before he realises that he has actuaUy been caught. The disease may run its course quickly or may revolutionise his life; with that question we are not at the moment concerned. 39 The Crowd in Peace and War The point to be made clear is that absorption into a crowd is not an intellectual but an emotional process. A band passes along a street with colours flying and sol- diers marching proudly behind. The onlooker is tempted to march with them, falling into step. He almost feels himself one of them; the collective spirit touches him. He follows on to barracks and enlists. Or he meets a friend who has enlisted, and catches the spirit from him, or reads an exhortation in his newspaper. Nine times out of ten enlistment results from a sudden emotion. The man whose reason drives him to enlist against his will is a rare and high exception. It is the will itself that generally suffers change under the influence of crowd- emotion. "In the East," writes Kinglake in " Eothen," "you might as well dispute the eflScacy of grass or grain as of magic. There is no controversy about the matter. The effect of this, the unanimous belief of an ignorant people, upon the mind of a stranger is extremely curious and well worth noticing. A man coming freshly from Europe is at first proof against the nonsense with which he is assailed, but often it happens that after a little while the social atmosphere in which he lives will begin to infect him, and if he has been imaccustomed to the cunning of fence by which Reason prepares the means of guarding herself against Fallacy, he will yield himself at last to the faith of those around him, and this he will do by sympathy, it would seem, rather than conviction. I have been much interested in observing that the mere 'practical man,' however skilful and shrewd in his own way, has not the kind of power that will enable 40 Crowd-Units "him to resist the gradual impression made upon his miad "by the common opinion of those whom he sees and hears "from day to day." Let me, in this connexion, also quote a sentence to similar effect from one of Newman's essays: "PubHc "opinion especially acts upon the imagination; it does "not convince but it impresses; it has the force of au- "thority rather than of reason; and concurrence in it is, "not an intelhgent decision, but a submission or belief." "A Neutral Correspondent" writing in the London "Times" of May 27th 1915 describes how the German people were carefully and intentionally hypnotized by their Government. This is perhaps the greatest achieve- ment in that kind that has ever been accomplished in recorded history. I have received permission to quote at length from this very remarkable communication. When the writer entered Germany he believed himself able to take a detached view of the war, and that he was "proof against 'atmosphere.'" He presently found that he was mistaken, and that his mind was being in- fluenced by the peculiar mood of the public into which he was plunged. "The chief agency in the creation of this state of mind, "apart from the direct influence of the thorough military "organisation of the State, is the shrewd management of "the Press. It will be remembered that, on the outbreak "of war, the whole German Press was turned against "England overnight. Twenty -four hours after having "praised the vigorous efforts of Great Britain to prevent "war, it denounced Sir Edward Grey as the moving spirit "in a conspiracy to assail Germany. None but distorted 41 The Crowd in Peace and War "views from abroad were allowed to be published. The "German people were told only what it was desired they "should believe. All unfavourable information was "treated as 'Hes,' and a thoroughly-organised Press "campaign was carried on in neutral countries in the "same sense. The 'neutral' opinions thus inspired were "reproduced in Germany as evidence that impartial foreign "opinion supported the German view. "By these means the war-mind of the German people "was created and fashioned. The process stiU goes on, "though, as I have before remarked, the French, Russian "and British communiques are now regularly printed in "the larger newspapers, and are frequently criticised in "the communications from the German Headquarters "Staff. But foreign reports have no influence whatever "upon the German mind. The Germans are so convinced "of the accuracy of their own official versions that no other "reports count. "It is the same with enemy newspapers. In the Vic- "toria Cafe at Berlin I was able to read, day by day, the "French, Italian, German, and neutral journals. They "were also to be bought in the newspaper kiosks of the "large towns. No remarks were made when I asked for "them; but I noticed a pitying smile on German faces "whenever they saw others read them. "It is not the big papers of international repute that "exercise the greatest influence in Germany. In the "smaller towns and agricultural districts it is the local "Press that counts. In that Press none but German "reports are to be found, with German explanations and "German accusations against enemy countries. No at- 43 Crowd-Units 'tack upon the enemy is too gross for this Press to repro- 'duce, and nothing in Germany's favour is too absurd 'for its readers to swallow. Not only is the victorious 'progress of the German, Austrian, and Tm-kish armies 'constantly celebrated, but the financial, industrial, and 'social conditions in Germany are declared to be far 'superior to those existing elsewhere. Dissensions be- 'tween the Powers of the Entente are reported, and dis- 'turbances among their peoples are invented and dwelt 'upon. "Every scrap of news that can be turned to account 'in this direction is magnified, distorted, and supplied 'from central agencies to thousands of local papers. 'Leading articles are supplied in the same way. More- 'over, the German Headquarters' report is posted up 'every day at 4 p. m. outside every telegraph office, and 'is circulated in special editions of the local papers, which 'contain nothing but this report. This local Press exer- 'cises a kind of hypnotic influence upon the people at 'large. As I spent most of my time in Germany in the 'smaller towns and rural districts, I came under its spell. 'Everybody had a ready explanation in answer to inquiry about the failure to reach Paris or Calais. When I 'a^ked about the news of revolutions in India and Egypt, 'and of Turkish victories on the Suez Canal, I was assured 'that they were perfectly true. The British denials were 'treated as 'the usual English hes.' And it was argued 'as the strongest evidence of the unreliability of EngHsh 'reports that naval losses which neutrals had witnessed 'had been kept secret by the British Admiralty. "The cumulative effect upon me of this constant sug- 43 The Crowd in Peace and War "gestion, with its well-calculated variations in the films "of the cinemas and in the periodical literature, was such "that I seemed gradually to lose my individuality and to "become merged in the German mass. If it was not "possible for me to react against it, what chance has a "German, no matter how sceptically disposed, of acquir- "ing a true perspective? It was with a sense of relief, "as of the passing of a nightmare, that I crossed the bor- "der, and found a freer atmosphere and neutral associa- "tions in Switzerland." This infectiousness of crowd-emotion is specially mani- fested in pubHc, and particularly in political meetings. The ordinary large political meeting seldom consists wholly or even mainly of convinced members of one party. Usually the audience is of a mixed pohtical com- plexion, with one party in a majority in the room and in complete possession of the platform. At the beginning of the meeting opponents may make objections and interruptions, but this phase can generally be rehed on to pass. Once enthusiasm has been kindled all are carried away by it, and even convinced opponents may be seen in the excitement of the moment applauding speakers and sentiments which in the quiet of their own homes they hold in horror. With the close of the meet- ing the mood may pass, but often it happens that a permanent change in a man's sentiments is thus effected, and that is why political managers regard public meet- ings as of importance. They know well enough that the enthusiasm of a meeting means very little as an index of the opinions of a community, but they likewise know that it is a powerful force in affecting individuals, and 44 Crowd-Units experience has taught them that it is often far from transient. Thus says Plato (Ep. vii. 341), "In social "intercourse, a light may be suddenly kindled in the "mind, which when once generated, may keep itself "aUve." Few, if any, mature men and women realise how many of their opinions which they firmly hold and by which they shape their lives, have been "caught" rather than con- sciously and iatentionally adopted by reasoning process. Indeed, I believe it safe to assert that the ordinary man's opinions have been "caught" at one time or another and that his individual reason conducted him to few of them. Take, for example, the life of an ordinary professional man. In infancy and early childhood his parents and nurses from the very beginning, by continual command and correction, impress the crowd-idea upon the shaping mind. "It is not proper to do this: it is vulgar to do that. Such "an action is bad manners, such another is wrong. Take "your hands out of your pockets. Don't bite your nails. "See how nicely behaved little Tommy is. What would "his mother think of you if she saw you do so and so? " No one will think you come of decent people if you behave "thus." Day after day and hour after hour what people wotild think of him is hammered into the child, whilst the settled public opinion in the form of morals is imposed upon him as having divine sanction. Thus, not merely his conscience, of which there is much more to be said, but his manners and the whole of his nascent ideas of conduct, of right and wrong, of dress and behaviour — everything is imposed upon him as a crowd-precept backed by more or less of a rehgious sanction. 45 The Crowd in Peace and War A remarkable example of the effect of such training came in my way recently. A boy was employed in a pic- ture dealer's shop, where he gave great satisfaction alike to his master and the customers by his agreeable manners and obliging disposition. He was evidently a "well "brought up boy." His master one summer Saturday, when the weather seemed set fair, said to him: "You'll "have a fine day to-morrow. What do you do on Sun- "days? Do you ever get a game of cricket?" "Oh! no, "sir," he replied, " not on Sundays !" The master was sur- "prised at the boy's tone because he knew that his father "and all his family were pronounced agnostics and prob- "ably called themselves infidels. So he asked: "Why not "on Sundays?" The boy answered rather indignantly: "We have been better brought up than that. It's not "respectable to play pubhc games on Sundays. I should "be ashamed to do a thing like that." It was not that he thought it in any way wrong to play cricket on Sunday. There was no religious prejudice against it in his family. It was bad form. It was contrary to the crowd-stand- ards of the folk among whom his people Uved. "It was "worse than wicked; it was vulgar," as the child said in "Punch." If home training be thus effective in imposing general crowd-notions on a child, what shall we say of school- training and especially, for our present purpose, of the training of an English pubhc school? The normal English schoolboy often reacts against what masters inculcate and is liable to adopt in his heart of hearts, and later in life to put in operation, exactly contrary principles to those inculcated by school authorities. It is from his fellow- 46 Crowd-Units boys that he really learns the conduct of life, and is made to feel the difference between what is "good form" and what is not. His discomfort as a new boy is due to the fact that he is a misfit, a round peg in a square hole, an individual who has not yet become a crowd-unit. He has to learn the school standards, to know what his fellows consider good behaviour and what disgraceful. A num- ber of trifling external details are insisted on, but they are mere signs and emblems of pubhc opinion — to close or not to close all the buttons of his waistcoat, to wear or not to wear a hat at a particular time of day, to walk or not down the middle or along some special side of a street — these are mere outward signs, conformity to which marks a general conformity to the unwritten school code. Through- out the whole of a public schoolboy's life in any big school he is in the grip of the school-crowd's standard, conform- ably with which in conduct, in speech, and consequently almost of necessity in spirit, his notions come to be fash- ioned. The shaping thus accomplished leaves its impress on the boy for life. The Universities, or at all events the old English Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, of which alone I can speak with any assurance, produce a hke effect upon undergraduates; and special colleges have a particular tone and spirit of their own. After subjection to the impress of the University crowd for three or four years, almost every man takes the print of it indelibly upon his personahty. He receives and thenceforward accepts and tries to act up to certain standards; he also adopts a group of prejudices. Standards and prejudices are alike quali- ties caught from the University crowd and not imposed 47 The Crowd in Peace and War by any superior authority. Here again there are numbers of trifling observances to be followed, unimportant in themselves but indicative of crowd-conformity. Thus in my time an undergraduate in cap and gown did not carry an umbrella no matter how heavily rain might be falling. He cut the tassel of his cap short, and there were many other trifling proprieties which I forget. If these details had been imposed by University authorities they would have been evaded. They were imposed by the undergraduate crowd's collective opinion, and no one dreamed of not conforming. What was true of such trifles was, of course, equally true of important matters of conduct and manners. Conformity becomes habit and effects a correspondent shaping of the mind which after life does not avail to destroy. Society again is one of the strongest agencies for fash- ioning the manners and setting the standards of mature life, whilst it should be remembered that the school and college tones have the standards of society ahead of them with which it is always their aim to be in harmony. The clear-sighted John Henry Newman wrote upon this matter : "All that goes to constitute a gentleman — the carriage, "gait, address, gestures, voice; the ease, the self-pos- " session, the courtesy, the power of conversing, the suc- "cess in not offending; the lofty principle, the dehcacy "of thought, the happiness of expression, the taste and "propriety, the generosity and forbearance, the candour " and consideration, the openness of hand — these quali- "ties . . . are they not necessarily acquired where they "are to be found, in high society?' Here is no quack rubbish about "nature's gentleman." Newman knew the 48 Crowd-Units world too well. Society is the creation of art, and a gentleman (whether he be a good man or no) is one who has acquired the Art of Living — who is an artist in the handling of the raw material of life. Rarely indeed an individual may be born in a low rank of life with a natu- rally faultless taste. Only such an one might be de- scribed as a "nature's gentleman," but that is not what the phrase is used to mean. In common use it means an honest fellow; but in truth a man may be a dishonest blackguard and yet a "gentleman." There are countless other crowds to which a man belongs more or less completely as he passes through life, and each of them leaves its impression upon him. Here is what Mr. Asquith said the other day ia reference to the late Mr. Percy Illiagworth : — "No man had imbibed and assimilated with more zest "and sympathy that strange, indefinable, almost impal- "pable atmosphere, compounded of traditions and of "modern influences, which preserves, as we all of us think, "the unique but indestructible personality of the most "ancient of the deHberative assemblies of the world." The House of Commons is the most conspicuous group of associated men in these islands. It does not differ in kind from any other assemblage that might have a like continuity, any more than the Cabinet differs in kind from any other Committee or board that has business to attend to. Every body, every community, every group and association of men puts its impress more or less strongly upon the individuals composing it, and each one of them, in proportion to his impressionability, carries away from it and adopts as part of the fabric of what he calls his 49 The Crowd in Peace and War opinions the opinions proper to these crowds and derived by him from them. Finally, it is in this way that public opinion constantly acts upon the individual and more often than not sweeps him along with it. PubHc opinion is a powerful and sometimes a valuable force, though it is easy to contemn it from superior points of view. "Thus," said Bismarck, "when great numbers of common people live close to- "gether, individualities naturally fade out and melt into "each other. All sorts of opinions grow out of the air "from hearsays and talk behind people's backs; opinions "with httle or no foimdation in fact, but which get spread "abroad through newspapers, popular meetings, and talk, "get themselves established and are ineradicable. People "talk themselves into believing the thing that is not; "consider it a duty and obligation to adhere to their belief, "and excite themselves about prejudices and absurdities." To rail in this way against public opinion is a temptation to which all are hable to yield at times. But it is futile. We have it and shall always haye it with us, and it is as useless to rail against it as it is f oohsh to be carried away by it. A commonplace public man — I suppress his name — says that: "Public opinion is generated in the homes of "the British people." Nothing could be more untrue. It is generated everywhere except in the home. It arises where people meet and is propagated by the newspapers. People catch it just as the schoolboy catches the opinion of his school and the Members of Parliament the standards of the House of Commons. So London changes the countryman that settles within her; so Paris remakes the 50 Crowd-Units Frenchman; and New York, I suppose, the American. So the lawyer and the physician are moulded according to professional standards, and so the soldier takes on the esjytit de corps of his regiment and the army. A well- known writer used the following phrase: "The 20th, a regiment of historic renown, is famous for imparting its aggregate quality to the individual soldier." All regi- ments do so, but not all inherit equally high standards. Thus also a nation acts upon its citizens with a pressure that begins in their childhood and never ceases. "You Enghsh," foreigners say to us, "when you've said a thing " 'isn't Enghsh,' fancy you've settled it, " — and as a matter of fact we have, so far as our own ideas and con- duct are concerned. But the commonplace bigoted crowd- unit, who thinks nothing of any other crowd, naturally holds that the opinions and standards of his own society should be those of the whole world; when he says of a thing that "it isn't Enghsh," he means that it is bad form everywhere and for everybody, and that attitude foreign critics naturally resent. Some of us doubtless know better, but how few they are compared with the mass, whose only views are those they have absorbed from the national and smaller crowds to which they belong or have belonged. An Englishman and a Frenchman, when they come to- gether, say on a high mountain side, in circumstances unusual in the daily life of either, find one another much of a sort and easily enough comprehensible. But in their normal lives they are divided by the fact that, as back- ground of all they do and experience, they have each his own national crowd. The Enghshman in every act pos- 51 The Crowd in Peace and War tulates an English background and group of sanctions, the Frenchman a French. They are hke actors upon different stages, surrounded by different scenery, and acting before different audiences. It is thus that mis- understandings so easily arise between persons of different nationalities, and the moment the misunderstanding does arise, the national divergency leaps into prominence and they begin to dislike one another, and the EngUshman goes away saying he dislikes the French and the French- man the English. It is an entertaining if somewhat saddening occupation to sit where people congregate for talk and to listen for the expression of a really independent original personal opin- ion, or an idea expressed in original terms. Language itself has taken form in the mouth of crowds; as for the words themselves, the crowd determines their meaning. Whole phrases and sentences become fixed in form by having been shaped to express collective ideas. Con- vention governs the thoughts, the beliefs, and the speech of most. Few indeed are those who habitually test opin- ions in their own minds before acceptance and reutterance. Fashion in clothes is nothing but the outward and visible expression of the normal individual's general conformity in all things to the crowd of which he or she forms an item. How few people we meet who are even partially inde- pendent individuals! Almost all talk the same com- monplaces, utter a common group of opinions, and resent disagreement with them. Intolerance is proof that they are mere crowd- voices, because all crowds are necessarily intolerant. Notwithstanding this apparent uniformity, it 52 \ Crowd-Units is certain that no two individuals are alike in structure of mind and character. If they would think for themselves they would have to express infinite divergency of view. But they do not think. They adopt opinions like ready- made clothes or mere fashions acquired from the pattern- maker. Here is what an American writer, Mr. G. S. Lee, has to say on this matter: — "What this means with regard to the typical modern "man is, not that he does not think, but that it takes ten "thousand men to make him think. He has a crowd- "soul, a crowd-creed. Charged with convictions, gal- "vanized from one convention to another, he contrives "to five, and with a sense of multitude applause and "cheers he warms his thoughts. When they have been "warmed enough, he exhorts, dictates, goes hither and "thither on the crutch of the crowd, and places his crutch "on the world, and pries on it, if perchance it may be "stirred to something. To the bigotry of the man who "knows because he speaks for himself has been added a "new bigotry on the earth, — the bigotry of the man who "speaks for the nation; who, with a more colossal preju- "dice than he had before, returns from a mass meeting "of himself, and, with the effrontery that only a crowd "can give, backs his opinions with forty States, and walks " the streets of his native town in the uniform of all human- "ity. This is a kind of fool that has never been possible "until these latter days. Only a very great many people, "all of them working on him at once, and all of them "watching every one else working at once, can produce "this kind." 53 The Crowd in Peace and War It seems at first sight a regrettable fact that things should be so in our modern world. But they are so, and so they must remain as long as the present conditions of rapid intercommunication and promiscuous pubUcity, controlled by newspapers and often manipulated for their own ends, continue and even further develop. We have arrived at a time when we can even speak of the public opinion of the world. It is still young and feeble, but it will be stronger presently. We have seen it arise against Germany in the current war, and some Germans have felt the force of it. Some day it wiU be a much stronger force and will produce results that we cannot foresee. Will that be an evil development for humanity? Surely not. If public opinion can have an evil effect upon a narrow- minded individual, it is not a necessity of the circum- stances of human life that crowds should atrophy their units. The wise man refuses to part with his individuality to any crowd whatever. He may belong to many, he will yield himself to none. To some, as to a nation, he will be- long all his days; to some, as a school or college, he will entirely belong but only for a limited period of his life; to some, such as societies, meetings, and so forth, he will belong intermittently. To some he will render up more of himself than to others. In time of war he must yield himself wholly to his coimtry. Herein, however, the wise man differs from the fool. The fool gives himself wholly to each and every crowd that successively attracts him. In consequence he becomes an aggregate of inconsisten- cies. But inconsistency, as Mr. G. L. Calderon says, "weighs for nothing with enthusiasts. The faculty of "believing contrary things at the same time, of believing 54 Crowd-Units "that which they cannot understand, or that which they "know to be false, is the most characteristic feature of "that large and growing class. Yet their opinion is by "no means to be neglected; for they are the makers of "reputations; they are the light kindling-stuff which sets "the soldier world on fire." I cannot better conclude this chapter than with a pas- sage from a Commencement address by Mr. George E. Vincent, President of the University of Wisconsin: — "Modern students of human nature have changed the "old saying, 'Many men, many minds,' into the new dic- "timi, 'One man, many selves.' There is much talk of "multiple personahty. Our complex modern life reflects "itself in a composite person. A man is said to have as "many selves as there are social groups of which he feels "himself a member. To maintain a business self which "can look a moral self straight in the eye, to have a theo- " logical self on good terms with a scientific self, to keep "the peace between a party seK and a patriotic self, to "preserve in right relations a church self and a club self — "such are the present problems of many a man or woman. "One way to escape embarrassment is to invite at a given "time only congenial and harmonious selves, and to ban- "ish from the company the selves that are discordant and "disconcerting. The strong soiU is he who can summon "all his selves into loyal team play. Personahty is the "name men give to this unity of the self, and purpose is "the organising principle. Only, as many groups of "thought and feeling are schooled into co-operation by a "well-considered steadfast aim, can a man be master of a "single self. To be sure, unity of a sort can be achieved 55 The Crowd in Peace and War by one who has a meagre company of selves. Narrow- ness, provincialism, bigotry, describe a personality in which unity of purpose is won at the sacrifice of breadth, outlook, and sympathy. The highest type of person- ality grows out of many far-reaching selves which have been selected and organised into unity by a dominant purpose. It is no easy task to unify often divergent and conflicting impulses, habits, memories and ideals into a harmonious hierarchy of aims. But such single- ness of ideal and effort creates power. The ideal per-. sonaUty includes many selves organised by a masterful purpose and unified by a spirit of harmony." 66 CHAPTER IV CROWD-CONTINUITY IF a main function of the Crowd be to incorporate and give currency and effect to ideals, it possesses a scarcely less valuable quality in that it is the depository of what we call Tradition. Tradition is Crowd-Memory. I do not here refer to traditions concerning facts, such for instance as that which any villager in my neighbourhood will relate about a certain disused quarry by Medway- side, whence he will tell you — and probably with truth — that the stone was hewn for the Tower of London. Such traditions of fact are as often false as true, are almost always inaccurate, and cannot be believed without other confirmation. It is only when events have been clothed in poetic form and are become legends that a crowd carries them down through successive generations, and then it is the spirit and emotion, produced by the event on the folk, which thus survives. Written record is as much superior to tradition for preservation of facts as an edu- cated individual is to a parish meeting as a reporter of them, record being a function not of emotion but of intel- ligence, which no crowd can possess. But emotional tra- dition can linger long in the heart of a crowd, though it caimot be completely written down even by a poet. This brings us to consider how a crowd can be extended through time as well as space, and the consequent results of that 57 The Crowd in Peace and War temporal extension in their effect upon the units at any moment composing it. We may take the House of Commons as type of one crowd which has a long hfe, and is formed of successive generations of individuals. From the present back to its beginning there may have been, there probably has been, an unbroken series of overlapping memberships. Mem- bers of the House to-day may indeed be in veritable physical coimexion with the House of, say, the fourteenth century. The people of a given day are all in physical contact with one another. Each meets many, each of them many more, and so on, so that the impression pro- duced by one upon another may be transferred to a third, on to a fourth, to a hundredth, to a thousandth, till by physical transference it reaches the very end of the earth, without any intervention of writing or printing. Thus also, in the case of the House of Commons, the general impression produced by a man on his contemporary mem- bers in the fourteenth century, may have been transmitted by the survivors among them to the new members of the next generation, and by them to those that followed them, and so on down to the present day. Personal contact with the past through successive generations is thus similar to personal contact with remote places through moving individuals. Dominant personalities have left a continuing impres- sion on the assembly to which they belonged. Fox, Burke, Pitt, and all the rest still influence, still to a certain extent survive, in the House of Commons of to-day. Its tone and spirit would be a Httle different from what they are but for them. The last newly-elected member, when 58 Crowd- Continuity he takes his seat, comes within the range, the actual still operative physical range, of those bygone influences. Gladstone still affects him, though he may not, probably does not, reaUse it; Disraeli iu some degree has influence over him; and all the great aristocrats of the past as well as aU the great tribunes of the people Uve on in the last batch of those Labour Members who have not merely been elected to but have been captured by the spirit of that undyiag assembly. Its great men too were often as much fashioned by it as it by them. Imagine a General Election taking place to-day in which not a single former member were returned; imagine that brand-new House meeting but inheriting no permanent oflacials, no rules of procedure, no recorded or remembered customs. Sup- pose too that the existing Parliament buildings had been burnt to the groimd, that a new building had to be devised for the new House, and that no one knew what the form, the seating, and all the other important details of the old one had been. Evidently such a House of Commons would fail to resemble hx many important respects the body we know. It would represent the people of the United Kingdom at the moment, but the actual House of Commons also represents in some degree the gene- rations that have passed. When the London County Council was for the first time called into being, it was a body without traditions, not elected even by old parties with characteristic policies. It had no build- ing prepared for it, no permanent officials. Everything had to be created. Anyone who remembers that first Council and compares it with the existing body will recog- nise a great difference between them. That radeed was 59 The Crowd in Peace and War born in enthusiasm, a new enthusiasm for London. Its members were ready for all manner of hard work and self- sacrifice, but they had to find out what they could do, how they could co-operate, how oppose what seemed to them wrong principles; they had to discover what each one was good for and how his capacity and eagerness could be harnessed and made available for the common purpose. Nowadays the London County Council has no such problems. Its rules are formulated and have received many precise interpretations to meet particular and unforseen situations. Its parties are organised. Its Committees have the area exactly defined within which each works. It has begun to accumulate traditions and prejudices. It has built up a body of permanent officials trained in its service. It possesses a definite spirit and is well launched on what will probably be a long career. It still possesses much of the enthusiasm and ambition of youth, but it already grasps at the splendours which every long-lived crowd likes to obtain at the expense of the individuals who generate it. There is no reason why a public body should be splendidly housed. There is no reason why it should work in a palace. A row of ordinary houses would do for its offices and any shaped hall for its general assembly. But it has the power to house itself as it pleases at the public expense; it imposes upon the pubhc by pretending that the public's glory lies in the splendour of its representatives' accommodation; and it votes itself a palace beside the Thames in open and shameless rivalry with the Houses of Parliament. Such is the way of rep- resentative crowds which are not controlled by the veto of wise individuals. 60 Crowd-Continuit y The London County Council at its first assembling had the ParUaments and municipal assemblies of the world for examples. The House of Commons when first it met had no such forerunners. It had to find itself and to shape its own structure and environment. That was a long and gradual proccess. By contest with the Crown and with the House of Lords it slowly fashioned and slowlier still learnt its own powers; it likewise learnt to know itself. Always divided by parties, it yet always retained and indeed continually increased its sense of its own separate collective life. Whig and Tory might be violently opposed. They became as one when the dignity of the House was assailed. Thus in process of time the spirit of the House took form, and with each generation it came to enshrine an ever widening volume of tradition. It set its mark upon its members with ever increasing inevitability, and that mark grew more precise and individual with the passing of the generations. They came and went, but the House remained. Its political complexion might change; the social levels from which its members were drawn might become more various; the House did not itself alter in spirit with any corresponding rapidity. It altered of course. All things that have life grow and change and ultimately become old and pass away. But the life of the House of Commons has been long and it is not yet coming to an end. The generations vanish swiftly. The collective body changes slowly. It preserves its ancient traditions. Its spirit is largely traditional. One generation may alter it a little, may engraft on it some new ideal, may widen its outlook in some direction, but the largest factor in its spirit at any moment is not the element contributed to it 61 The Crowd in Peace and War by its existing members, but the vast inJaeritance it has received from all the generations which have preceded them. In these respects the House of Commons is like any other collective body, membership in which is of a defined and limited character. Such is a public school, a college, a university. All alike are the guardians of tradition and inherit most of the spirit which they incorporate and transmit. Without organised crowds the generations would not be held together as they are. The vitality present at any moment in a group of this kind is far stronger than its constituent members at any moment could contribute. They supply its executive hmbs, but the force that moves them comes from far back among the generations whose bodies rest from labour. The fixe that is within them is none of their kindling; they have but to tend the flame. The Japanese, with their beautiful social instinct and their recognition of the priceless value of continuity, express this indebtedness of the present to the past in a very beautiful form. After their victorious campaign against Russia, they performed a remarkable national ceremony. Headed by their King they summoned the spirits of their ancestors to receive the thanks of the living for what the dead had enabled them to accom- plish. They placed the laurels of victory not around their own brows, but on the tombs of the forefathers that begat them and had generated and infused into the people those ideals and that spirit which had enabled them to attain their success. The ceremony expressed a profound truth. Of the Chinese also, it is written, that for 62 Crowd-Continuity them the generations past and the generations to come form with those that are ahve one single whole. All live eternally, though it is only some that happen at any moment to be upon the earth. They think of Humanity as a single Being, spiritual and eternal, manifesting itself in time in the series of generations. What any generation can accomplish in faith and growth is httle compared with what has been accomplished for them by the generations that have gone before. This is evident enough in the case of material possessions and the great treasure of the world's art, but it is still more true for the world's ideals. It is these that are the most precious of all its belongings, and for the preservation of these it has, not individuals, however great, but crowds to thank. For let me declare again that it is in crowds that ideals reside. It is they that incorporate them and they that transmit them. An individual may invent an ideal, but unless he can get it incorporated in a crowd it is bar- ren of effect and dies with him. Rail against the crowd as we may for its intolerance, its pride, its fickleness, its lack of measure, and all the other shortcomuigs of which we are only too easily aware, it yet remains true that upon crowds our spiritual life depends, that from them we draw our enthusiasms, and to them we owe those flames of love and passion and glory which make the life of each individual the splendid opportunity that it is. Alas! my subject runs away with me, and many a simple fact needing to be set down plainly in its place is liable to be forgotten in the heat of writing. I have written only of the limited crowds, the organised bodies that have a definite membership, but others of more The Crowd in Peace and War nebulous character must not be forgotten. Such is Society, to which we have already referred in another connexion. That Ukewise develops with age and trans- mits its changing spirit from generation to generation. We speak lightly of "the traditions of good society," but no one can overestimate their power as a civilizing agency. Time is an essential element in creating them. The spread of good manners downward through the various strata of the inhabitants of a country is a very slow pro- cess, though in normal times it is continuous, and occa- sionally may be hastened by purposeful effort. Thus in our own day the labours of primary school teachers — a most excellent class who have taken up much of the work of the mediaeval clergy — are producing an abeady visible effect in taming the savage manners of the lower orders, as those still living can remember them. Even so, however, good manners cannot be propagated quickly. They have to take root in descending layers of the people, mainly by a kind of induction from each layer to the one below it, and this inductive process is liable to be con- fused with snobbery. Women are the principal agents. They become civilized in any rank before their menfolk submit to the process under their direction. It is possible to make a good guess at the age of the civilisation of any people by noticing the manners of the lowest classes. Thus in India good manners are prac- tically universal and are as much the prerogative of a sweeper as of a Maharaja. The same is true of the Arabs and all Bedouin folk, who have cultivated manners from an extreme antiquity. Egypt likewise, and for the same reason, is inhabited by a highly civilised people. When 64 Crowd-Continuity we pass to Europe the condition is markedly different. Only in Spain are good manners almost universal, and that is because there the ancient civilisation of Rome was but slightly set back by the numerically small num- bers of the Teutonic invaders and was soon afterwards reinforced by the distinguished conquering Moors. All round the Mediterranean civilisation is of greater an- tiquity than further north, and consequently manners are good, if not of such high finish as those of the East. The ancient Celts fell early under the influence of good tradi- tions and fine ideals. These were expressed in the great volume of poetry which we know them to have produced. Extinct though it be, we may infer, from the strength and gifts of the Celtic race, that its poetry must have been of high and perhaps Homeric quality. Celtic civilisation, unhelped by Rome, is the foundation and ultimate cause of the good manners of the peoples of Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. Rome in her turn must have been an important agent in spreading good manners, whilst the Italians all came within the sphere of the ancient Mediterranean civilisation. What degraded European manners was the Barbarian invasions. The inroading Teutons who flooded the Roman Empire came out of their gloomy forests with the manners of bears, as the Sagas would have enabled us to judge had we not enough surviving evidence before our eyes. The present rude and uncivilised behaviour of the German army is not an index of depraved nature, but rather of immaturity. They are animated, as we know, by Prussian ideals, and the Prussians are of all European peoples chronologically nearest to barbarism. Modern 65 The Crowd in Peace and War conditions have enabled them suddenly to become, not civilised, but rich and strong, and they not unnaturally have mistaken strength for a higher kind of power which they must learn by actual experiment that it is not. In true civilisation they remain, and no blame to them, the most backward people in Europe; the manners of the Prussian lieutenant are proof of it. Moreover, in proportion to the volume of the Teutonic element in any place is the thickness of the stratum of population burdened with bad maimers. Starting from the centre of France and journeying north-eastward, the manners of the masses of the people degenerate tiU they reach their lowest level in Prussia. This is not due to any original sin or depravity in the German people, but simply to the fact that they have not been in contact with civili- sation long enough for good manners to permeate the folk. England was deluged with this strong but iU- civilised immigration in the fifth and following centuries. It met with a relatively feeble population, partly civUised by the Celts, and they to some extent raised in time the level of the mass. In France more of the old element survived, and French influence has always been a great factor, even before the Norman conquest, in civiUsing England. But even so there have only passed over us some fifteen centuries since the barbarian deluge, and that is not long enough. It has taken five thousand years at least to generate the good manners of India. Time will do as much for us unless a new barbarian deluge occurs. The measure of the civilisation of a people is not, as the science-poisoned folk of to-day beUeve, its equipment 66 Crowd Continuity with railways, trams, motor-vehicles, telegraphs, tele- phones, and the like, nor even its efficiency ia drains, water-supply, hygiene, and other material adjustments. The true measure of what is rightly called civihsation, of that quahty which the word "civilisation" was coined to express, is manners, — not the manners of the aris- tocracy, or upper classes, but those of the lower and lowest classes. Not tUl all the people have good man- ners are they describable as wholly civilised. The North and West Europeans and the English-speaking folk of North America have not, as a mass, had experience of high civihsation, and do not know what the word really means. They use it, but of course they use it incorrectly. The French are more civilised than the English and the Spaniards than the French. The people of the Western continent are necessarily less civilised than those of Europe and Asia. All of us are on the up grade, but we have a long road to travel before any of us can come to be a people of gentlemen, as the Indian people actually are. Thus the age of a crowd is an important element in its tone and consequent power of affecting the individuals composing it. A newly foimded school or University can- not influence its members in the same way as an old foundation. It may provide them with more exact, effi- cient, and elaborate teaching in the sciences and other subjects of study, but it cannot put on them any indi- vidual hall-mark. At most it can but start by incor- porating the general ideals of its age and country and giving an opportunity for strong individual teachers to exercise their personal influence in laying the founda- 67 The Crowd in Peace and War tion of what will in time grow to be an institutional tone. A realisation of this fact has led the students in young American universities to supplement the lack of local tradition by aid of the so-called Secret Societies, — Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha Delta Phi, and so forth, — which are intercollegiate and have been formed and fostered, each one, to encourage and enforce some special undergradu- ate virtue or type. It is by age that any society, from a debating club up to a nation, accumulates traditions and becomes enriched with ideals and the memory of past emotions. The people of any generation are what their forefathers made them and are only in a small degree themselves responsible either for the growth or for the decay that may happen in their time. For there are ideals that make for decay as others for growth, and every society which is born must some day perish. The Roman Empire perished utterly by the breaking up of its organisation, the destruction of its ideals, and the inroads of masses of new people. Italy went on existing, even the City of Rome continued, but there was a break, a solution of continuity. The old crowd died and a new one came to occupy its place. The same misfortune overtook Greece. Neither modern Italy nor modern Greece is a continuation of the old. They merely live in the old house. But modern Japan is a direct continuation of old Japan and has suffered no solution of continuity in its years of growth. India, for all its revolutions and invasions, has in its central structure the unsevered stem of Brahminism. Even Egypt, not- withstanding the Greek, Roman, and Arab conquests, is still at heart the land of the Pharaohs and still embodies 68 Crowd-Continuity the same ideals which the pyramids expressed for their builders. Pride of race, of nationhood, of citizenship — these are emotions which no one will undervalue, or consider to be anything but a precious birthright for those who inherit them. They are what the individual inherits from the crowd into which he happens to be born, in proportion to its age and its historical accomphsh- ments, to the great names it honours and to the great deeds its fathers have wrought. It is a notable power for good. " Civis Romanus sum," — "a citizen of no mean "city." CHAPTER V CROWD-INSTINCTS ALL crowds possess, amongst other qualities, two iastiQCts which are of special importance in rela- tion to our present inquiry: the instincts of ex- pansion and of self-preservation. The former is indeed to a large extent the outcome of the latter, because the larger a crowd becomes the less easily can it be suppressed. Both, in fact, are normal qualities of a living entity. Growth is the sign of life. Whatever lives must have its birth from something that went before, its early stages of weakness and comparative formlessness, then the stage when it takes on a definite and individual form, after that a longer or shorter period of growth, succeeded by a time of culmination, and finally the inevitable decline and death. Through all these stages the rustinct of self- preservation is not absent, for even in extreme old age it not imcommonly survives. Few Uving things yield themselves willingly to extinction — crowds hardly ever. The desire for expansion finds its counterpart in a crowd's attractiveness, to which reference has already been made. Crowds, like some serpents, fascinate the victims they are about to devour. For in this case also the victim does not merely join himself to the crowd, like one brick in a building to another, but he is, in certain cases at any rate, so absorbed and digested by it as to lose 70 Crowd- Instincts his individuality altogether and become an iategral part of the larger creature, as a cell in Kving tissue. The hunger of a crowd may be compared with the hunger of an animal; it must assimilate, not only that it may grow but that it may merely remain alive. The individual cells in tissue are worn out, consumed, and have to be replaced; so is it with the units of a crowd. By death, by change of mind, by alteration in the circumstances of individual life, every crowd is being destroyed aU the time, and the destruction of its tissue must be made good. This is obvious in the case, for instance, of a school or university, and it is hardly less evident in a church or a pohtical body. All clamour for converts, for new adhe- rents, new members. Nowadays many crowds, from nations downwards, try to keep accurate statistics of their membership from year to year so as to detect the first signs of a falling off. The census of a people, like the temperatiu-e of a human body, is a valuable indication of the national health. When any undesirable change is registered the political physicians hurry forward to diag- nose a disease and prescribe remedies. At such times the crowd becomes more or less alarmed, as several European nations have been in recent years by the falling- off of their birth-rate. The sudden drop in the birth-rate of Germany may have been one of the impulses which impelled the governing class in that country to plunge Europe into war, and thus, in case of victory, to provide a new stimulus of growth to the Teutonic crowd. The instinct of Expansion has been throughout all his- tory one of the great causes of war, not, as I trust here- after to show, the deepest seated cause, but an important 71 The Crowd in Peace and War contributory cause. In earlier stages of civilisation it was oftener operative than in modern times; indeed, the ordinary run of histories seem concerned with Httle else throughout two or three thousand years than wars of expansion. It was by such wars, or by wars seeming to be such, that the states and finally the Empires of the ancient world were built up. The growth of organised humanity was largely effected by adding village to village till small states arose, and then by adding statelet to state- let; and this was almost wholly accomplished by war and conquest. In the remote past of earliest Egypt and Chaldsea we can dimly perceive the rudimentary pro- cess going forward. Thus Egypt grew to be a single kingdom by an agglomeration of small units and the contemporary development of an internal structure that gave to the whole a common life, while simultaneously the little local gods and totems were amalgamated into a pantheon and a national religion was wrought out of them. Thus Babylonia arose, thus the Hittites, Assyria, the .^gean power, and so forth. And then the kingdoms fought one another into Empires. The Babylonian Empire fell to the Assyrian, the Egyptian and Assyrian to the Persian, the Persian to Alexander, and the Alex- andrian to aU-embracing Rome. With each increase the internal structure became more complex and eflScient, religious ideas more comprehensive, mankind more so- cially alive, till finally it was possible for a world religion to be born and a new cycle of human development to begin in the large Empire of Rome, which contained or was in contact with all then existing centres of civilisation. The instinct of national expansion is, however, only an 7S8 Crowd- Instincts example on a large scale of what is felt by every crowd, even the most ephemeral. A public meeting loves to be crammed. The tighter the pack the warmer the en- thusiasm. Individuals would be less uncomfortable if they had more room; yet what meeting would willingly thin itself? If the hall is but half full the air is better to breathe and all present can sit at ease; yet no one is pleased by such considerations; on the contrary a thinly attended meeting lacks life and is far harder to deal with than a pack. Those present want a bigger company. They welcome an influx, and if by some management the place fills up, a general sense of satisfaction is spread. Ten meetings of a thousand could be much more easily addressed than one meeting of ten thousand, and those present could more quietly hear and calmly estimate the value of a speaker's arguments. Moreover the ten small meetings would be cheaper to organise and, if reason were the thing appealed to, much more efficient than the one great meeting. But what do we in fact see? An English movement dates its success from the day when it can fill the Albert Hall with a shouting throng; and it is an obvious fact that one successful, enthusiastic Albert Hall gathering is worth more for purposes of propaganda than a score of smaller gatherings in unimportant halls and chapels. Every crowd desires to grow. The agencies and arts of propaganda are the expression of this desire. Public meetings, advertisements of all kinds, publicity in every sense, the circulation of literature, the enterprise of newspapers, the adoption and diffusion of popular cries or popular songs —7 these and all manner of like activities 73 The Crowd in Peace and War have no other end than to spread abroad the ideals of crowds and attract adherents to them. But there are other very significant actions which display the crowd- nature even more plainly. A crowd that has never come physically together gains greatly in vigour if it can be in whole or even in part embodied. If it can be seen it will bring to bear on outsiders that attractiveness which every embodied crowd possesses. If it can see itself it will grow hot. Hence the great political demonstrations which are sometimes organised, — the huge assemblages, for in- stance, of the Primrose League, or the mammoth meetings in Hyde Park. The people who attend them only for the most part know that speaking is going forward at certain centres. Many of them hear nothing, but that makes no difference; they see one another, or rather they see the crowd, and they are very liable to catch its en- thusiasm and become a part of that greater body of which those present are a representative portion.^ 1 The following remarks on theatre-audiences by Mr. Walkley are notable in this connexion. "The truth is, the behaviour of the audience, the theatrical crowd, is not profitably to be studied as something separate and pecuhar. It ought, we submit, to be considered as part of a larger subject, the behav- iour of the crowd in general. A crowd has an individuahty of its own, merely because it is a crowd, and it cannot but be interested in its own individuahty, apart from all reference to the cause which has brought it together. The crowd finds itself an interesting spectacle. From the moment of its formation it becomes self-conscious, self-assertive. To absorb its attention — that is to say, to make it forget its own existence — is an extremely difficult feat. How many platform orators, how many speakers in the House of Commons, how many preachers, how many actors can do this? So few in any given generation that the whole gen- eration knows their names. In his preface to Le Fils Naturel the younger Dumas compared the theatre in this respect with the church. 'Like 74 Crowd- Instincts An even more rudimentary application of the principle of crowd-attractiveness is the organisation of processions. The longer they can be made the more useful they are, and the more they attract and impose upon the outsider. Nothing would seem less likely to convert an opponent iato an advocate of female suffrage than to see a number of women marching in orderly sequence along a street, even if they carry flaming inscribed banners and dis- tribute leaflets as they go. But pohtical organisers know the value of such efforts, and are willing to spend a con- siderable fraction of their resources upon them. A re- markable instance of this crude method of propaganda was the procession of "Business men" which marched along Fifth Avenue, New York, to show themselves as a crowd opposed to the election of Mr. Bryan to the Presi- dency of the United States, and to the ideas of his sup- porters as represented in his person. No one made any speeches. The "Business men" just marched along in ordered ranks and showed their mass for what it was the church,' he said, 'we (i.e., the dramatists) address ourselves to men assembled together, and you cannot gain the ear of the multitude for ' 'any length of time or in any efficacious way save in the name of their "higher interests.' What is called, then, the 'inattention' of the crowd ' is proof of the independence, and the potency, of its existence. It is not 'reaUy inattention; its attention, on the contrary, is of the keenest, but ' it is directed to itself. Hence the perpetual difficulty of all arts which, ' like the art of the theatre, involve the presence of a crowd. The crowd ' has assembled because it is interested in the particular art, but, when ' once it is assembled, it finds another subject of interest and a dangerous 'rival to the artistic subject — namely, itself. The great dramatist, the ' great actor, is the man who can master this enemy of his, the absorbed ' delight of the crowd in its own existence. If it is true nowadays that ' 'half the people in the theatre do not listen to the play,' we fear that is ' an indictment of the play, not of the people." 75 The Crowd in Peace and War worth. The efifect produced upon pubhc opinion was con- siderable. If it did not defeat the candidate, it contrib- uted to his defeat, and that, not because of the individual weight and wisdom of this and the other person marching along, but because of the crowd of them, all united by a common emotion of hostihty to Mr. Bryan's raw political theory of things, a hostility just now for the fourth time vindicated, despite President Woodrow Wilson's "a£Eec- "tionate" solicitude. Further, the crowd not only needs to make adherents and thus maintain its existence and increase in voliune and power; it needs no less to assimilate, to digest, the individuals which it swallows up. The whole force of public opinion within a crowd Is bent on compelling the complete identification of the individual with itself. The business of every crowd is to change free individuals into crowd-units, to make them feel with it, act with it, and if need be give their very lives for its benefit. The domi- nance of the crowd over the individuals composing it is one of the most important facts to be noted and remem- bered. A thousand illustrations might be cited. It is nowhere more evident than in the case of poUtical parties. Most intelligent men if left to themselves would have a set of political views of their own, and no two would think quite alike. That kind of freedom of the individual mind is most undesirable from the party organiser's point of view. He wants "good party men" and them only. Gilbert put the common point of view wittily in the well- known lines: — "Every boy and every girl that's born into the world alive "Is either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative." 76 Crowd- Instincts The business of the local poHtician is first to catch adherents to his party and then to driU them into "good party men," so that they accept the views of party leaders whole and without question, and change them without protest when ordered to do so. Thus our Free-Trade Conservative party was all but transformed into a Pro- tectionist body at the word of command of some of its leaders. The individual conservative who adhered to the views he had held for a lifetime became a party-pariah if he refused to change them. The same thing happened to the other side. The old Liberal doctrine of Laissez faire was given up when the Socialists captured the party organisation, and those old liberals who adhered to the views they had learnt from Cobden, Bright, and Mill, likewise became pariahs in their own party and found their very names and watchwords stolen from them and used for the furtherance of views the very opposite to those that had given them birth. The fact is that pohtical parties are not the incorporation of any reasoned set of opinions or political theories, but only of a group of emo- tions. Views and theories can only reside in a brain, and that no crowd possesses. The business of the politician, as we shall see, is to form views and theories and then catch hold of a crowd and by passion and enthusiasm, not by argument, compel them to carry those views into effect. "Don't reason with them," said the late Mr. Henry Labouchere to me; "hardy assertion is the secret "of all political success." Hardy assertion may evoke enthusiasm and thus obtain the assent of a crowd when reasoning would fail. If a pohtical body is thus despotic over Its members it 77 The Crowd in Peace and War is not in this respect different from any other crowd. Wit- ness the despotism of opinion in a piibhc school, still more in a religious body. Dogmatism and intolerance are the necessary qualities of every crowd, so that 1;o combat and neutralise them is one of the greatest neces- sities of every age. The views of any individual may be attacked by another with perfect freedom, but the mo- ment a view has been adopted by a crowd for whatever reason or by whatever means, that crowd considers it treason if a member of it attacks that view. To do so is heresy. Thus M. Anatole France writes, "Un here- tique, dit Bossuet, est celui qui a une opinion a lui, qui suit sa propre pensee et son sentiment particuher. . . . Ce qui est vrai, rephque M. Bergeret, c'est que les hommes animes d'une foi commune n'ont rien de plus presse que d'exterminer ceux qui pensent differem- ment surtout quand la difference est tres petite." Here is another case in point, illustrated by a letter addressed to the London "Globe" some years ago: — " Sib, — Being in Hyde Park this afternoon with some "friends, we came across a Meeting being held by a pro- " Boer from Exeter Hall, who was denouncing your paper "for urging on the attack to break up their meeting on "Friday, but I am glad to say he had no hearing, for "we closed around him, and hundreds of us started sing- "ing 'Rule Britannia' and 'God Save the Queen.' He "was in a tighter corner than at Exeter Hall; he was "nearly torn to pieces. He ran for his life down Oxford "Street, but was stopped by a Hussar, and had what he "deserved. He was rescued by the police and was taken 78 Crowd- Instincts "to Marylebone Lane Police Station for safety, and was "followed by the crowd, all singing the national airs. "When arriving at the station we sang 'God Save the "'Queen,' and the policeman who was escorting him had "the pleasure of taking off this pro-Boer's hat, as he was "not gentleman enough himself, after which the crowd, "some fifteen hundred strong, marched back to Hyde "Park in the hopes of finding some more, but none were "to be seen. I may state that this pro-Boer stated that "he intended sending letters of protest to your paper, but "we would not hear him read them, but no doubt you will "not receive them, as they were torn up by one of the "crowd. AU praise is due to your paper for announcing "Friday's meeting in Friday's issue, so that the pro-Boers "could not have it all their own way. "I am, yours, etc., "True Born Enghshman." "True Born Enghshman" no doubt considered him- self to be expressing highly patriotic sentiments in this remarkable letter, for patriotism masquerades in many forms. Patriotism, which is the crowd-emotion of a Nation, makes at times supreme claims on every citizen and enforces them by a public opinion so powerful that few can or desire to evade them. In time of war patriot- ism demands the very life of any of its citizens, and the demand is enforced by all kinds of sanctions. To the crowd all individuals are alike. The youthful Darwin and the youthful Bill Sikes are the same to it when war threatens its existence. It draws them Into the ranks side by side, drills them to a common obedience, and sends 79 The Crowd in Peace and War them to take an equal chance before the guns of the enemy. The crowd does not think much of the death of an individual (unless he be of the crowd-exponent order to be hereafter mentioned). What is death to a man is only a trifling wound to a crowd. The slaughter of many is still only a wound to the collective body, and if it possesses the potentiality of life and growth, that wound will heal within the lifetime of the next generation. From the crowd's point of view all its units must some day die while it abides; nor does their death matter. "Who dies "if England lives?" The crowd gilds the death of those who sacrifice themselves for it and calls the dead un- realised Darwin and the dead unmanifested Bill Sikes alike heroes. But the poor young man who would have set the world on fire is dead all the same. Common crowd-opinion is that his death has been worth while. But was it.'' Have there not in fact been individuals who were more precious than many a nation, though perhaps it might be argued never more precious than the nation that produced them? For the national crowd at any rate the death of any individual in its defence is worth while, but it is only actually and in very truth so on the assump- tion that crowd-Hfe, crowd-survival, is worth more than the highest individual life. We readily assume that the life of a man is precious, that to live is worth while, that life means something and is a great and glorious reality, however mysterious and inexplicable it may be. Is crowd-life similarly valuable and in a higher degree? If the crowd were to break up, while all the individuals composing it lived on, would that necessarily be a catastrophe? Has the crowd also 80 Crowd- Instincts a soul for whose weKare the individual is justified in sacrificing his own life? We say "Yes," speaking the voice of public opinion impressed upon us from child- hood; but is public opinion right in the nature of things, and not merely from the crowd's point of view? Few people, I imagine, could off-hand give a reasoned and convincing answer to this question. If I were to say — as the further progress of my argu- ment will show that I am far from saying — that some individuals are far more precious than the crowd, and ought by no means to sacrifice their lives even for their coun- try when at war; Lf I were to claim that aU martyrs have been iU inspired: public opinion, as represented by my reviewers, would turn and rend me. That would be an example of crowd-intolerance, of which a word must now be said. Conventional people, who are the commonest voice used by pubhc opinion, always distrust the unconven- tional man and look upon him with suspicion. The reason is because a person who sets minor conventions at naught seems to them likely to treat in the same easy fashion those higher conventions on which rests Society • — the organised crowd. Such a revolted individual, outside of and perhaps opposed to the organised crowd, may become the centre of a new and hostile crowd by which the existence of the crowd in possession may be imperilled. The instinct of self-preservation is thus also one of the factors in the development of intolerance, for a crowd's most potent dread is the fear of annihilation, and it can only be annihilated when it is supplanted by another crowd. As every crowd has small beginnings 81 The Crowd in Peace and War and gathers in the first instance around a freely thinking individual as its nucleus, the instinct of self-preservation makes the members of every crowd fear, and therefore tend to hate, any individual who differs from them. Bees not only kill stranger bees from another hive, but also individuals from their own hive who have strayed away for some days and then find a belated way back. Tribes of low development in the Amazon forests act in the same manner. They kill every Indian belonging to another tribe who comes in their way; and if one of their own tribe is absent for slk months or more they kiU him likewise on his return. Rubber agents are aware of this fact and used to avail themselves of it to enlist rubber gatherers. They had only to catch an Indian and keep him away from his tribe for about that length of time and he inevitably became their man for life. If he ran away from them there was nowhere for him to go; his old tribe would kiU him and so would the members of any other tribe. Their tribal instinct of self-preserva- tion took that form. Intolerance finds its classic exemplification in religious bodies, and those not of one age or religion but of all ages and all religions. Witness, as an ancient example, the destruction with which the priesthood of Thebes overwhelmed the reforms and the memory of the first great monotheist, the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV. Medi- aeval bigots were not more thorough. Whenever a par- ticular kind of crowd manifests in successive generations over a long period a similar imperfection, the reason is to be sought not in some vice of the people involved, but in the nature of the crowd itseK, that is to say in the nature 82 Crowd-Instincts of things. Religious intolerance is involved in the nature of a religious crowd. Though all crowds are generated and united by emotion, they are organised and used by lead- ers to carry out some pm-pose intellectually conceived; but a religious crowd is formed about religious emotion and has no other end than to propagate and maintain that emotion. The emotion may be capable of intellectual analysis and its character or concomitant beliefs may be intellectually defined as dogmas, but the fact remains that behind all the dogmas, rituals, and organisations of any church there lies finally not an intellectual conception but a reUgious emotion. Hence of all crowds the religious are the most emotional. Further, seeing that of all human qualities the emo- tions are the most evanescent, the most liable to vary, and that crowds by their very nature must be fickle, it follows that the instinct of seK-preservation in a religious crowd is more alert than in any other, because the emo- tion that holds such a crowd together is of an exceptionally unstable character. When we come to the consideration of the relation of crowds to religion we shall have to con- sider the means taken by religious bodies to give stability to their structure; at present it suflSices to note the fact of this instabiUty. In no category of human crowdship is it so easy to start a new group, first as a subdivision of an older crowd, presently as an independent body. All crowds are rather easy to split, but none so easy as reU- gious crowds. The semi-religious character of modem socialistic movements is indicated by the tendency of socialistic organisations to subdivide. A new form of religious emotion may arise anywhere and at any time. 83 The Crowd in Peace and War A single orator suffices to give it vogue. Thus every church is always in fear of innovators. The smallest movement may grow with incredible rapidity and become a danger to the persistence of the body within which it arose. No prophet of a new emotion can be regarded as insignificant even at the start. A camel-driver made Islam, and the world trembled. Intolerance therefore, that is to say hatred of any divergence from a settled rehgious form, is almost a necessary quality in every rehgious body. A new form of religion, after a longer or shorter period of growth, becomes defined as clearly as its professors can define it, and then resists with all the power it can control every attempt to alter its definitions or transform their scope, not that its individual members care about the words, or even for the most part understand them, but because the permanence of the crowd is involved in the maintenance of its formulas. The instinct of every crowd is to resent freedom of speech in any sense opposed to its own views, because it fears that an opposed speaker may be able, by the possession of an orator's hypnotic power, to create a crowd adverse to it. A crowd does not fear its own conversion. What it dreads is the creation of a beast like itseK and inimical to it. Free individuals, that is to say individuals who are not mere crowd-units, delight in free speech, for others as for themselves, and like to hear views explained and enforced which are not their own. To such men the dis- cussion of divergent opinions is the very salt of human in- tercourse. But no crowd can preserve such an attitude towards what it calls heresy. The woimd a crowd fears 84 Crowd- Instincts is detachment of its constituent items and their absorp- tion in another crowd. It in fact fears this worse than their death. If an adherent is killed the loss is "minus one"; whereas if he is not only taken away but added to another crowd the loss is "minus two." Thus conversion is twice as deadly as death, just as desertion to the enemy is, in the case of an army. Indeed conversion is more than twice as deadly as death, because a crowd may even profit by the self-sacrificing death of one of its members. "The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church." Hence the desire to manufacture martyrs, when circumstances do not happen to produce them, is an expression of the seK-same crowd characteristics as intolerance, but acting in another direction. Admitting all the good qualities possessed by crowds, and recognising how necessary and efficient they have been in the development of civilisation and humanity, we are not called upon to be blind to their many essential defects, and their instinct of self-preser- vation is the parent of some of the worst of these. Rec- ognition that such must be the case has led to a great deal of rather indiscriminate abuse of crowds, whereof let the following citation from Hazhtt ("Table Talk," p. 130) serve as an example : — "There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, "selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the "Pubhc. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of "itself. From its unwieldy, overgrown dimensions, it "dreads the least opposition to it, and shakes like isinglass "at the touch of a finger. It starts at its own shadow, "like the man in the Hartz Mountains, and trembles at "the mention of its own name. It has a lion's mouth, 85 The Crowd in Peace and War "the heart of a hare, with ears erect and sleepless eyes. "It stands 'listening its fears.' " If there were not much to be said on the other side the case for the Crowd would indeed be a bad one, and social disorganisation should be the aim of every wise individual; wise men, however, are not often to be foimd labouring for that. The self-preservative instinct of a crowd is manifested in countless other ways, which the reader can easily observe for himself. It wiU suffice if I cite one more. It is this instinct, curiously enough, which at our present stage of civilisation is the great impediment to the Eugenics propa- ganda. The purpose of Eugenics is of course to make the stuff of a people stronger and the crowd of them therefore more efficient; but at present you cannot get the public to think so. What the public, like any other crowd, instinctively dreads is loss of membership, that is to say the imtimely death of its members unless they give their lives for it. An executed miirderer does in fact part with his life for the crowd as completely as a soldier slain on the battle-field, but no crowd will realise this. It is in response to this instinct of the pubUc that so much trouble is taken to save the lives of weakly infants and to keep alive the unfit of all kinds. This instinct inspires the "cockering-up" of the imbecile, the scrofulous, the con- sumptive, the violent criminal, the insane, and the conse- quent continued propagation of the unfit. Nature provides for the extinction of such by disease, malnutrition, poverty, and the hke disqualifications. But the crowd, vaguely desirous of keeping up its numbers, fights this tendency of nature, not at all in the interest of the individual, but 86 Crowd-Instincts through an emotional misconception of its own interests. Of course the time may come when pubKc emotion may be directed in another direction through the compelling influence of clear-sighted individuals. It is reason and science only, at present, that perceive the excellent results which Eugenic provisions could produce, but reasoning will never put them in force. Public opinion is not formed by reason but by emotion. Eugenists must quit their laboratories and statistical bureaus, must go forth into the pubhc area, and evoke the passions of men on their side before they can accomplish any practical result. They will succeed in proportion as they enlist on their side the crowd-instinct for self-preservation and expan- sion. Kindle in the crowd the desire to be stronger and to contain more long-lived units; make it feel that this can be accomplished by working along certain hues, and the emotion of the crowd will force that work along without any sort of regard for the interests and prejudices of individuals. Only crowd-emotion can bring this about, not scientific reasoning, be it never so conclusive to_ the small minority who are capable of understanding it. 87 CHAPTER VI CROWD-COMPELLERS WE have thus far only considered the human indi- vidual as a crowd-unit or as a man keeping his individuality as pure and himseK as independent as possible from all crowd-influence. But a man may have another and far more important relation to a crowd: he may be its leader. What then are the conditions of leadership? What is the nature of the relations between the leader and the crowd he leads? The life of any kind of crowd-leader is what we call "pubUc life." It is life led under the eye of the crowd, conformably (so far as it is visible) to crowd-conventions, crowd-morals, crowd-stand- ards, and employing crowd-language. In return for these limitations the leader enjoys a greater or less privilege of controlling crowd-action and wielding crowd-power, or at least of appearing to do so and of shining with a corres- ponding prestige. To live in the crowd-atmosphere, to play with the crowd-beast as a Hon-tamer with lions, to partake of the mighty crowd-life, feel its throb, its power, its vaster vitality — such are the temptations that take some tolerably decent individuals into the bondage of public life. It is said that they have a thirst for power, but that is an insufficient description. Money is like- wise power, which an individual may wield without help from any crowd. Crowd-power wielded by an individual 88 Crowd-Compellers is of another sort and may be, often is, combined with relative iadividual poverty and weakness, though the poverty has a way of passing off pretty quickly! A wealthy individual can do within limits what he pleases; a public man can only do what he can persuade or compel his crowd to please. Crowd-leaders fall into one of three categories: the crowd-compeller, the crowd-exponent, and the crowd- representative. Let us consider these three types ia suc- cession. The crowd-compeller is a type that will be recognised without difficulty. Such in recent days was Napoleon, such Disraeh. Such were the great conquerors of the past— Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne. Such the builders of empires, the initiators of widespread popular movements. These are the men who conceive a great idea or far-reach- iag plan, who fashion and master a crowd big enough to give effect to it, and who drive the crowd to do the work they determine that it shall do. Disraeli, in " Coningsby," thus described such a man as "a primordial and creative "mind, one that will say to his fellows, 'Behold, God has "'given me thought; I have discovered truth; and you " 'shall believe.' " Observe how naturally inspiration from Heaven is claimed for these. They are likewise frequently credited with the gift of prophecy. Thus Mazzini, in pointing out the difference between the types which I name the crowd-compeller and the crowd-exponent, describes the former as "men of the mighty subjective "race, who stamp the impress of their own individuality " — like conquerors — both upon the actual world and "upon the world of their own creation, and derive the life 89 The Crowd in Peace and War "they make manifest in their works, either from the life "within themselves, or from that life of the future which, "prophet-like, they foresee. The great men of the second "category reflect the images of the external world Like a "tranquil lake, and, as it were, canal their own individu- " ality to identify their soul successively with each of the "objects that pass across the surface. Each are equally "powerful: the last more especially caU for our admira- "tion; the first more especially awaken our affection. "_; Foresight is a necessary quaUty for a crowd-compeUer. Poets, scholars and the like, even the greatest, do not need it. But all business, all politics, all doing depends on fore- seeiag difficulties and providing against them. Every crowd-leader needs foresight, but the foresight of the crowd-compeUer is not as to what will happen but as to what he can cause to happen with the human organism under his hypnotic control. Foresight, however, under- standing of men, quick insight, capacity for right decision, great intellectual qualities of many kinds — all these together, do not suffice to make a crowd-compeUer, and many of the great ones have been conspicuously lacking in some such capacities. The essential quality without which all the rest profit nothing is what is called hypnotic force. Thus it was said of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, when he went as Ambassador to Turkey, that though he was "clothed with little authority, except what he could "draw from the resources of his own mind and from the "strength of his own wilful nature, yet it was presently seen "that those who were near him fell under his dominion, "and did as he bade them, and that the circle of deference "to his will was always increasing around him." 90 Crowd-Compellers It is seldom that a man can make himself so effective to influence the course of events and the fate of nations as this great diplomatist actually did for better or worse, by the mere impress of his will upon individuals with whom he came personally into contact. Normally the crowd- compeUer is one who comes into direct contact with a crowd and masters it by the power of oratory, or at any rate by such masterful speech as attains the effect usually ascribed to oratory. There is indeed a kind of crowd compulsion of a low order commonly well exemplified in revival meetings. Here, for instance, is a specimen as reported in the New Orleans "Times-Democrat," describing the efficiency of a negro preacher, Hamp Scott by name. The meeting had been duU, and the reporter was about to make his escape, "when an old cotton-headed negro started a camp-meet- "ing hymn. He sang in a wailing minor key that went "straight to the nerves, and before he got through with "the first stanza, I could feel the tension in the atmos- "phere. When he finally ceased Scott himself jumped "up and began to intone another hymn — a typical negro "composition, with the refrain: — " 'An de sinner is a burnin' in de pit ! ' "He droned each verse in a thrilling imdertone that was "almost a whisper, everybody joining, but when he came "to the cHmax he suddenly straightened up and rolled "out the refrain like a clap of thunder. The effect was "electrical, and in five minutes half the congregation was "on the verge of hysterics. Then followed the most "remarkable part of the whole performance. As the "hymn died down Scott set up a sort of chant. As nearly 91 The Crowd in Peace and War as I could make out he simply repeated the words 'Oh! 'Lawd! Oh-h-h!' at the same time swaying his body back and forth; but all the negroes took it up and the monotonous reiteration had a strange mournful cadence that reminded me somehow of the breaking of waves at sea. Whether it was some pecuhar quahty in the voice of the leader, or the weird surroundings, or mere cumu- lative excitement, I can't say; but the chant soon had everybody under its spell. Some of the darkies fell back, staring and rigid, like cataleptics, and others writhed on the floor, foaming at the mouth and tearing at their clothes. Still others wept and shouted, and all the while the chant continued, rising and falling like the wind in the chimney." This exhibition of hypnotic force exercised by an indi- vidual over a crowd is evidently of a low order, but I will here cite an example of a not dissimilar phenomenon in which a very different class of persons was concerned. It is cited from the unpubUshed Journal de Piffoel} The occasion in question was a meeting of Polish exiles which was held on Christmas Eve, 1840, in honor of the fete-day of Mickiewicz. Slowacki had recited some verses in honor of the poet, whereupon "le sombre Mickiewicz" arose and improvised a reply. "Personne ne pent dire exactement ce qui s'est passe; " de tous ceux qui etaient la chacun en a garde un souvenir "different: les uns disent qu'U a parle cinq minutes, les "autres, disent une heure. II est certain qu'il leur a si "bien parle, et qu'il a dit de si belles choses, qu'ils sont tous ^ Printed in W. Kareniae: "George Sand, sa vie et ses oeuvres": Paris, 1912, p. 201. 92 Crowd-Compellers "tombes dans une sorte de delire. On n'entendait que "cris et sanglots, plusieurs ont eu des attaques de nerfs, "d'autres n'ont pu dormir le nuit. Le comte Plater, en "rentrant chez lui, etait dans un etat d'exaltation, si "etrange que sa femme I'a cru fouet s'est fort epouvantee. "Mais pendant qu'il lui racontait comme U pouvait non "pas I'improvisation de Mickiewicz (personne n'a pu "en redire un mot), mais I'effet de sa parole sur ses audi- " teurs, la comtesse Plater est tombee dans le meme etat que " son mari et s'est mise a pleurer, a prier et a divaguer. "Les voila tous convaincus qu'il y a dans ce grand homme "quelque chose de surhumain, qu'il est inspire a la mani- " ere des prophetes, et leur superstition est si grande qu'un "de ces matins ils pourraient bien en faire un dieu." This kind of ecstatic power is perhaps possessed by rela- tively few and may not be very wholesome, but the results produced by it are certainly remarkable, and not always evil. Of a higher kind is the power which some possess not so much of carrying along with them in their own enthusiasm an assemblage of already sympathetic or at least of neutral persons, but of mastering and compelling to follow them an assemblage openly and consciously hostile, and of making it cheer with enthusiasm opinions which were displeasing to the people before the speaker obtained dominion over them. I have before me the report of a public meeting, unfortunately too long for quotation and impossible effectively to abridge, which well exempli- fies this kind of authority. The speaker was not an orator, in the ordinary acceptation of the term. He was a public man of much force of character, whose course of action had been objectionable to a large body of the organised work- The Crowd in Peace and War men of a great city. He had the courage to call a meeting of his critics, which he addressed at length. The meeting was at first noisy and openly hostile to him. My news- paper report says that "verbal hot shot" was fired at him from all sides of the hall. He began by taking up a manly and courageous attitude. He adopted great plainness of speech. His instinct rather than any plan led him to put forward first certain broad statements on which he and the crowd were certainly agreed. They of -course began to cheer. Gradually he thus got hold of them, but it was half an hour before his hold was secure. Then he insinu- ated rather than stated some of the points of view to which they had been opposed, but did not dwell on them and quickly returned to matters of general human agree- ment. When he had them well in hand and all their sympathies were captured he explained his policy and they accepted it with cheers and sent him away after two hours' speech, covered with such glory and honour as was in their power to bestow. Pubhc men who can accomplish such a result possess the elements of crowd-compelling power. More qualities are needed, but that quality is essential. Once I had occasion to watch the rapid and masterful effect of the intervention of a single man at a critical mo- ment. It Was in the capital of a Central American state at a time of revolution. The city was being besieged, or rather attacked from one side, and the attacking force had had things their own way and were in possession of the outskirts of the city. Everybody expected it to fall next day and the defending force was on the point of sur- render. By good luck, however, the Governor of the city either fell ill or ran away. At all events the direction of 94 Crowd-Compellers affairs passed into the hands of the deputy-governor. No sooner was he in control than the whole atmosphere of the city changed as though by magic. The fightiug men be- came full of hope, the citizens lost their terrors. Trenches were dug in the night, breastworks of sacks filled with earth were raised. Every one — Spaniard, nigger, Indian, Chinaman, and European, and the various half-castes or quarter-castes of all five - — worked together. When the dawn broke fighting began again. The couple of guns which had been fetched by the rebels — gunners, ammuni- tion and aU — on contract from the United States, were presently silenced. The fighting was of the most desper- ate character. Out of 5000 men engaged on both sides less than 2000 were not kUled or wounded by the end of the day, but then the city was saved and the rebels were finally chased away. The result was produced by one man who authentically possessed the crowd-compelling gift. He was not an orator, so far as I know, but he was a born leader of men, and such need no gift of oratory. Oratory, of course, is a powerful helper in obtaiuing crowd-control, for, as Bagehot says, "An orator has a do- " minion over the critical instant, and the consequences of "the decisions taken during that instant may last long "after the orator and the audience have both passed "away." Orators, however, commonly belong to the crowd-exponent class, and are no less moved and no more masters of themselves than are the audience. Crowd- compelling orators are those, "who moving others are "themselves as stone." Such was Disraeli, such also in some degree was Mr. Joseph Chamberlain; such sometimes was Mr. Gladstone. 95 The Crowd in Peace and War Indeed the highest type of crowd-compeller has not often been an orator. They are usually silent men. Mr. Chamberlain in the latter part of his ministerial career was rightly regarded as the incarnation of the idea of British imperialism. He was even supposed to have been the inventor of that idea. As a matter of fact he was nothing of the sort. Lord Rosebery had been shaping and urging the ideal of our "wise, tolerant, and imaggressive Empire" while Mr. Chamberlain was a httle Englander, taking, for instance, a determining part in compelling our withdrawal from the Sudan after the Gordon catastrophe. Both in that policy and in his later imperialism he was acting as a crowd-exponent, voicing the existing ideas of his party, not imposing his own views upon them. But when he became a convert to protection, or rather when he threw off the control of Cobdenism (to which he had submitted) and reverted openly to his own original protective views, he was no longer the voice of any formed party, but be- came the exponent of his own personal opinions. There- upon he set forth on a new career as crowd-compeller. He had thenceforward to form his own crowd, to make it obedient to his will, to help it to grow and attain power, and he so far succeeded that before long it had become large enough and strong enough to capture the organisation of the Unionist party and to include the bulk of that party within the limits of his newly formed body. From that time on, so long as Mr. Chamberlain remained active in po- litical life, the Unionist party was in fact a Tarifl-Reform body, subject to his control and existing to enable him to accomplish the ends he had in view. Few will deny that if his physical health had been maintained his party would 96 Crowd-Compellers have captured a majority of the voters and he would have been enabled, in consequence of the force of his own domi- nant personality, to impose his will upon the whole country. The crowd-compeller does not listen for public opinion that he may guide his steps by it; on the contrary he is more likely to resemble the Claverhouse of Sir Walter Scott, whom he described as "profound in politics and "imbued, of course, with that disregard for individual "rights which its intrigues usually generate." The crowd- compeller forces the public to adopt his opinion; he makes that to be pubKc opinion. His own energy of na- ture impels him to project himseK upon the crowd, to realise himself in its larger life, to make it incorporate him, to make his brain the centre and originating power of its brainless body. Nor is there any limit to the human area within which he desires to reign. Instinct impels him to impregnate everybody with his views. He must go forward conquering and to conquer as long as his own individual life lasts. Nor does that suffice him, but he must, as far as he can, so organise the crowd which he forms as to make it incorporate his policy and continue to pursue it long after his own physical presence has vanished. It is thus that in the past men have first made themselves kings, and then have founded dynasties, which lasted as long as the original impulse continued, or till some great successor arose to infuse new life into the old ideal or replace it by a new one. The business of the historian, therefore, is not merely to trace the ideal or crowd-mind from age to age operating on the individual, but to observe the individual mind expressed in the crowd. Public opinion is never the opinion of the average man, for there 97 The Crowd in Peace and War exists no such person. It is the opinion or group of opin- ions imposed upon the pubhc by a succession of thinkers. The character of the pubhc in any age and country is determined by that of existing and past thinkers, who have operated on the crowd and obtained control over it. The value of public opinion is thus to be measured by the quality of the leaders who control or have controlled it. To measure the value of German public opinion in 1914 we have only to name the men whose opinions it voiced — Treitschke, Nietzsche, Bernhardi, the Emperor Wil- ham II. It is not the nation we must indict, but the compellers who dominated it. All nations are natural born fools! The manifestation of great crowd-compellers on the political world-stage is a rare phenomenon, such giants requiring not merely capacity but opportunity. A man's gifts and powers of insight must match his day. If the French Revolution had not gone before him Napoleon might have remained obscure. In our own time the number of great crowd-compellers, such as Bismarck and Cavour, have been few indeed. Cecil Rhodes did not rise to the full height of a career. We may suspect the existence of crowd-compelling powers of high degree in Lord Kitchener, but the fact, if it be a fact, will only be fully revealed in process of time. That he was called for imperatively at a critical moment by the national voice is a strong indication that the people recognised in him above all others the leader of whom they were in need, and such recognition is often sound insight. But the crowd-compelling power on a smaller scale is, in England at any rate, not a very rare quality. It is 98 Crowd-Compellers the power to lead men, a priceless heritage of certain classes in this country, where it is probably more richly possessed than in any other. This power is essentially hereditary, though developed by education. Unless the germ of it is in a man at his birth it can never be implanted in him. No amount of free education, of open competitive exami- nations, of selection by vote or any other agency, will enable individuals to become leaders of men unless they are born so to be. That is why good officers seldom rise from the ranks, unless the right type of man has first been compelled by circumstances to enter them. India was conquered and is held by the British subaltern, who as naturally leads the Indian soldier as a sheep-dog controls a flock. We do in fact in England breed and train such a class for our army, navy, and civil service, but unfortu- nately not for politics. We select politicians by a kind of competitive examination in stump-speaking, with results extraordinary. I was once returniag from Jamaica on a Royal Mail steamship, and there was a young British officer among the passengers. One day the amusements' committee arranged for sports, and one of the incidents was to be a tug-of-war. It was amusing to watch the confusion attending the formation of the string of competitors, the false starts at pulhng, and other little misfires. When things were at their worst up came the young subaltern and took the business in hand. Immediately aU the com- petitors became orderly; they gladly did exactly what he' bade them. His orders were brief and clear and the sum- mons to begin pulling came from his mouth like a pistol- shot. If it had been his own men he was orderiag, the 99 The Crowd in Peace and War instinctive obedience would have been self -explained; but it was a mere casual crowd of passenger-idlers. Yet they obeyed him instantly and instinctively because he pos- sessed by nature the power to command, which had also been developed in him by some practice. This power of command, accompanied as it always is by capacity fop individual initiative when required, is the most valuable attribute of the upper class in any nation. Upon it, far more than upon the individual capacity of working men, the success of a nation depends, not merely in war but in all categories of activity, and not least in manufacture and commerce. A good leader can get better results out. of second-rate human material than a bad leader out of a better class, for behind skill and knowledge, giving them most of their efficiency, lie spirit and the power of co-ordi- nation, and these belong not to the hands but to the brain of a leader. That nation is and always must be greatest in which the power of leadership is commonest, best acknowledged, and most employed. 100 CHAPTER VII CROWD-EXPONENTS THE crowd-compeller, as we have thus seen, is the type of man who produces a movement and either forms or gives a new direction to a nation, a party, or any sort of crowd. But when the move- nient is once strong and tending towards the attain- ment of its object, or has attained it, that movement in its turn, sometimes during the lifetime of its originator, oftenest after his death, produces new leaders, who have not made it but who have been made by it, and these men are crowd-exponents. They are often of a type that would have horrified the crowd-compeller to whose activ- ity they in fact owe their existence. The crowd-exponent is the man who feels by sympathetic insight and mere sensitiveness of nature as the crowd feels or is going to feel, and who expresses in clear language the emotion of the dumb organism. For all the ideas of a crowd are necessarily of a vague emotional sort and can only be expressed by them in the form of shouts or actions of approval or dissent. The crowd loves anyone who will express its ideas — "just what we've been thinking, — "that's true — go it, old man! — you're right!" Such are the normal responses of a crowd to its momentarily fittest exponent. He may be a speaker, or a writer, or a group of newspaper writers — but whatever he is, he 101 The Crowd in Peace and War is the voice of the crowd and his utterance is really theirs. He in fact borrows his thunder from them and gives back to them what he has himself received from them. Hence the chief quality of a crowd-exponent is sensi- tiveness, and the faculty he most needs is the power of speech. He is by nature akin to an artist; his is the stuff of which poets are made. Crowd-enthusiasm is the atmosphere in which he lives and breathes and has his being. It is not surprising, therefore, that he should often be an orator, nor that most entrancing orators should be of his type. His business and joy is not to think out the solution of some difficult social problem in the privacy of his study, and then go forth and proclaim a new gospel to an unwilling world. He waits till that work has been done and the crowd has already taken form; then he plunges into the thick of it and says with eloquence, power, and enthusiasm that which the folk about him are dimly and vaguely feeling. Whereupon they raise , him aloft with loud applause and worship him like a god because his voice has given them words and enabled the crowd to realise its own mighty, if vague and ill-defined, existence and power. To the born crowd-exponent the voice of the people is indubitably the voice of God. The great men of this sort do not go forth to find out by laborious research what a people are thinking, and having discovered it then consciously adopt and voice the public opinion. It is only the Uttle men who are always hstening at the key- hole of the public to catch some secret of its tones. The great men catch the opinion of the public as they breathe the air; they cannot avoid sharing it. It bears them 102 Crowd-Exponents away, willingly enough on their part as a rule, but whither it flows thither they must tend, even if that direction be the very opposite of the line they had previously been pursuing in the wake of their own judgment. The greatest crowd-exponent of the nineteenth cen- tury, in England at all events and perhaps in the world, was the late Mr. Gladstone, though he likewise possessed crowd-compelling authority. I remember to have heard Dr. Elhcott, Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, then a very old man, discussing with a contemporary the career of Mr. Gladstone as they had witnessed it. "I do not accuse him," said the Bishop, "of having changed his views to suit his politics; but I claim that his views have completely changed on two or three occasions, so that he came to advocate what before he had opposed, and to oppose what before he had advocated; and I have observed that these changes have approximately syn- chronised with the altered interests of his politics." Notwithstanding these remarkable coincidences, it is generally admitted, even by those who did not agree with Mr. Gladstone, that he was not the man to change his views for the sake of personal advantage, and that his volte face, even on the Irish question, was not made against his beliefs, merely in order to attain power, but that he did actually and truly change his mind, on that and other occasions. He did so, not intentionally and to gain some end, but because he could not help it. He felt the current changing or about to change in the political field, and he instinctively turned towards the new ideal. If he was thus conscious of the set of public opinion, 103 The Crowd in Peace and War he was even more keenly conscious of the mood of a crowd in whose presence he was actually speaking. Bage- hot wrote of him: — "No one half guides half follows the moods of his audi- "ence more quickly, more easily, than Mr. Gladstone, "There is a little playfulness in his manner which con- "trasts with the dryness of his favourite topics and the "intense gravity of his earnest character. . . . He re- "ceives his premises from his audience like a vapour and "pours out his conclusions upon them like a flood. . . . "He will imbibe from one audience different 'vapour' of "premises from that which he will receive from another." In these respects Bagehot contrasted him with Chat- ham and Burke, who were of the crowd-compelling sort, but the passage is too long for quotation.' The contrast between him and Disraeli was the most remarkable modern example of the opposition of two types of leader. The one speaking the voice of the crowd and impassioned with all its enthusiasms, its morals, and many of its prejudices; the other expressing only so much of his own personal opinions as he thought fit to reveal, never car- ried away by emotion, nor measuring men and events by the yard-stick of any crowd's morality. SmaU wonder that the two men were unsympathetic to one another, and that one of them could define the other, after receiving from him a douche of the crowd's passion, as a "sophis- "tical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his "own verbosity." Notwithstanding Disraeli's satire and the distrust of many of his best contemporaries, it is now not disputed ' "Biographical Studies," London, 1881, p. 95. 104 Crowd- Exponents that Mr. Gladstone was a really great man who lived and acted in pursuit of high ideals, and whose name is secure of repute among the greatest leaders of the nineteenth century. If he was a crowd-exponent he was among the best and noblest examples of the type. There are others of meaner sort who allow the emo- tions derived from the crowd they are addressing to run away with them and make them say the thing that on reflection they would wish not to have said. "Although "the Enghsh," wrote Kinglake, "are by nature wise in "action, yet, being vehement and careless in their way "of applauding loud words, they encourage their orators "and those also who address them in writing, to be strenu- "ous rather than wise; and the result is, that these teach- "ers, trying always to be more and more forcible, grow "blind to logical dangers, and leap with headlong joy into "the pit which reasoners call the absurdum. Then, and "not without joyous laughter, reaction begins." There is a yet meaner type of crowd-exponent even than these who merely at times lose their heads. There is the leader who is a conscious hypocrite and who fol- lows, and knowingly follows, the crowd he pretends to guide. A crowd, excited about some local matter, came running down a street. A man in the front rank stopped to speak with a friend he was passing on the pavement. After a brief greeting he hurried off, saying, "I can't stop "with you. I must run ahead of the crowd. I am their "Leader!" There are plenty of public men of this sort also, whose pohtics consist in anticipating the direction in which the crowd will move and then loudly directing 105 The Crowd in Peace and War it to go that way. The unguided crowd is always a fool, and the man that follows in front of it instead of guiding it must therefore often look like a fool also. I have referred above to the German publicists, Treitschke and the others, as the crowd-compellers who impregnated Germany with the vile political ideals from which the world is now suffering misery. But in fact these men were not true crowd-compellers but striking examples of a not uncommon type of prophet. They merely caught from a smaller crowd the notions which they expressed and imposed on a larger. They caught the crowd-spirit of the provincial and backward Prussian upper class group and they gave it currency throughout Germany and imposed it upon the whole nation as the German ideal; and they were able to dp this because political developments had made all Germany a new big political unit with Prussia at the top. The new Ger- many seeking for some ideal, upon which the diverse and previously discordant parts now composing the Empire could unite, was not unnaturally attracted by the notions which had carried Prussia to success, and this abstract ideal of might, hand in hand with the agitation which accompanied the formation of an Imperial navy (the Army not being in structure imperial but local) effected the spiritual unification of Germany, after the political unification had been accomplished. The philosophers therefore, though appearing to be crowd-compellers and receiving much of the credit and applause rendered to such, were in fact merely Prussian crowd-exponents, with all the feebleness, the narrowness, the emotional vice of their popular philosophy. 106 Crowd- Exponents In our own day the crowd has become more prominent as an active force, because better organised and more con- scious of its own existence and power than ever before, ex- cept perhaps in the case of the Parisian crowd during the French Revolution. It follows that we have with us and can study whenever we open our newspapers the sayings and behaviour of no inconsiderable number of very effi- cient crowd-exponents. The crowd is always quick to recognise an efficient exponent. It does not take him long to attain a position of leadership, or apparent leader- ship, provided he possesses the needful gifts of sensitive- ness and emotional speech. Thus the crowd merely as it were sniffed around Mr. Winston Churchill, recognised him immediately as one of its own sort, wagged its tail, and came to heel. The Welsh crowd as readily accepted Mr. Lloyd George and he had little difficulty in obtain- ing corresponding recognition when he came to occupy English platforms. He is, in fact, the most prominent and powerful crowd-exponent in our day. He is the visible and audible incarnation of popular tendencies. His emotions respond as sensitively to those of a crowd as ever a barometer to changes in atmospheric pressure. He has never manifested any trace of an individual mind or of independent thought. He has added nothing to the stock of political ideas, but he has perfectly voiced the ideas of the crowd by which he acts and from which he draws both his emotions and his power. It is said that in private life he is the most reasonable and moder- ate of men. No one would guess it from his public appearances. As a soUcitor it is related that he proved himself to be a master in bringing opponents to a com- 107 The Crowd in Peace and War promise. No one handled angry men better. Each felt, and probably felt truly, that he had the sympathetic understanding of the intermediary negotiator. This was due to his sensitively sympathetic nature. The same sensitive sympathy puts him in immediate touch with the emotions of a public meeting. When he addresses an audience of bankers in the City of London, he cannot fail to catch their tone, and both the ideas he expresses and the form in which he puts them are agreeable to his audience. The strongest warning ever plainly uttered to Germany came from his lips in the City of London, and then also he was voicing the opinions of the people he was addressing. In fact it may be suspected that the feeling of the audience led him to state their ease with somewhat less restraint than he might have used had his audience been colder. For the same reason when he went down to Limehouse and held up Lord Rothschild and other prominent citizens of London, no less patriotic than himself, to scorn and ridicule, he was merely voicing the ignorant prejudices of the crowd in the hall, and gathering the incense of cheers and enthusiasm from them, not because of the wisdom and enlightenment they were drawing from him, but because he was saying what they felt. Yet the same man who had abused the capi- talists of England throughout the length and breadth of the country from all kinds of popular platforms, was able, without the least difficulty, to become their spokes- man and executive officer when war broke out and the need for co-operation with the whole body of capitalists became imperative. No one was ever a more docile and consequently a more efficient Chancellor of the Exchequer 108 Crowd- Exponents under such circumstances. He had no prejudices. He was there to help men come together, to listen with sweet reasonableness to the wise, to catch their tone, to give effect to their efforts for the pubUc good. Only a really great financier capable of mastering in argument the big- gest minds in the financial world, of seeing further and more deeply into the enormous problems which had to be solved and solved at once, could have been more effi- cient than he was with his docile and sympathetic nature and his desire to discover and do the best. Finally, when party differences and oppositions were submerged under the overmastering tide of patriotic union with which the whole country moved against the foreign peril, when, in fact, party crowds disappeared and were fused together within the great single national crowd made supreme by the war, no one better than Mr. Lloyd George expressed the emotions of that crowd also. He caught its spirit at once and voiced its emotions, nor did he hesitate, or could he have brought himself to hesitate, speaking for it on February 28th, 1915, or rather it speaking in him, to tell the labour crowd, of which he himself had so often before been the applauded voice, some very home truths not pleasant for it to hear; and this he did not as, by personal and intellectual conviction, holding opposite views to theirs, but because another, and for the time being an opposed and superior crowd, was finding voice in him. Mr. Lloyd George is a more perfect example of the highest type of crowd-exponent pure and simple than was Mr. Gladstone. Both incorporated the emotions of their party or audience with similar ease. Mr. Lecky made the profound observation that Mr. Gladstone's 109 The Crowd in Peace and War vindictiveness was "more frequently directed against " classes or parties than against individuals," an indication of the absorption of his emotions in those of his crowd, for crowds envisage crowds or crowd-representatives, not individuals. The same observation is likewise true of Mr. Lloyd George. But Mr. Gladstone was besides a man of powerful individuality and had strong personal views of his own on certain matters, and those he never compromised at the bidding of any crowd, but rather showed a skilful crowd-compulsion in avoiding the raising of issues which would have placed his crowd-sympathies and personal convictions in opposition to one another. Not impossibly Mr. Lloyd George may suffer from a like fine disabihty. The crowd-exponent, then, is the voice and expression of the emotional crowd. Of course he must be an orator, because he must possess the qualities of sensitiveness, sympathy, and emotion which are essential to an orator, and he must command the flow of language which enables him to state easily and at once the emotions he experi- ences. He is likely also to be a phrase-coiner. He does not really guide the crowd; he does not enlighten it; he does not drive it. It enhghtens and drives him, so that his words and urgencies are not his own but those of the crowd with which, at the time of speaking, he is in hypnotic relation. The oratorical impulse disorganises a speaker's own mind. The higher faculties of reason cannot operate except with calm. But the orator neither conceives nor delivers his address with calm mind. His emotions are excited. His words are planned and spoken with excitement. This with us is as true of speeches 110 Crowd- Exponents made in the House of Cominons as from a public platform. It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the House of Commons that a member does not, as in some other deliberative assemblies, ascend a tribune and address the whole house, but speaks from his place on the floor. Louis Philippe, conversing with Victor Hugo, described the consequences of our method. He said: — "Have you seen the English Parliament? You speak from your place, standing in the midst of your own party. You are carried away; you say more often than not what others think instead of what you think yourseK. There is a magnetic communication. You are subjected to it. You rise (here the King rose and imitated the gesture of an orator speaking in Parlia- ment). The assembly ferments all round and close to you; you let yourseK go. On this side somebody says, 'England has suffered a gross insult'; and on that side, 'with gross indignity.' It is simply applause that is sought on both sides — nothing more. But this is bad; it is dangerous; it is baleful. In France oiu- Tribime, which isolates the orator, has many advantages." According to Bagehot it used to be said that "Mr. Pitt thought more of the manner in which his measures would strike the House of Commons than of the manner in which, when carried, they would work." Thus the strength of the party system with us may owe a good deal to the mere arrangement of seats in the House of Commons. A crowd-exponent need not necessarily be a demagogue, though the temptation to sink to that level is strong. There was nothing of the demagogue about Mr. Gladstone, 111 The Crowd in Peace and War or any of the really great crowd-exponents whose names are held in honour. As a crowd is merely emotional, its emotions may be either good or bad or both. It is the dwelling-place of ideals; it is likewise the home of preju- dice and greed. All crowds are normally hostile to all other crowds. That is in the nature of the beast. It follows that a crowd-exponent may either voice the ideals or the prejudices of a crowd. It is the latter that is the function of a demagogue. Bismarck, who was not in this matter an impartial observer, stated that the sup- port given to the Social-democracy in Germany in his time "rested on the fact that the judgment of the masses "is sufficiently stultified and undeveloped to allow them, "with the assistance of their own greed, to be continually "caught by the rhetoric of clever and ambitious leaders." This I believe to be a false conclusion. It is not the crowd that is caught by the demagogue, but the demagogue that is caught by the crowd. We saw something of the kind happen to Mr. Lloyd George when he went down to Limehouse. He became the voice of all that is worst in class-greed and class-prejudice. He did not instil those prejudices into his audience. He found them already there and could not resist the temptation to give them voice. Such is the danger to which crowd-exponents are constitutionally exposed. Ambition is not the main motive power that urges the crowd-compeller to action. It may be a concurrent impulse, but the determining shock that sets him in action is his own forcefully originated idea. He has some new thing to accomplish; he wills to drive the world in some new direction. He is seized by an irresist- 112 Crowd-Exponents ible impulse to act. He can realize himself in no other way and must dominate a crowd to that end. But am- bition is the main spring of a crowd-exponent's life. He cannot and does not desire to resist the impulse within him to be a figure-head, or the trumpet of another's voice. There is the great crowd hungering for expression, ready to acclaim with shouts and wonder the man that will express its emotions; and he, feeling those same emo- tions, longs to be that voice. The approval of the crowd is the breath of his life. Instinct impels him to speak; applause guides his words. All his individual qualities and relationships melt in the fire of that passion. Once he has tasted its savour he cannot live without the incense of crowd-approval. If they will not follow him he must at least rim on in front of them. "I am their leader!?' This in fact is what is called ambition — the desire to be the voice and representative of a crowd, not merely its official representative — a type with which we have next to deal — but its spiritual representative, feeling with it, quivering in every fibre with its life and emotions, express- ing those and getting back from the crowd that recogni- tion which it always gives to the speaker who becomes its voice. The crowd-exponent is the typically ambitious man. 113 CHAPTER VIII CROWD-REPRESENTATIVES WITH crowd-representatives we may deal more summarily, because as the name implies they are picturesque figureheads rather than indi- vidual forces. They may indeed also belong to one of the preceding categories, but, in so far as that is the case, they do not differ from other crowd-compeUers or crowd- exponents. A constitutional king is a crowd-representa- tive. As such he is a kind of official crowd-exponent, but more rarely he may be a crowd-compeller. The King of the Belgians has shown himseK a most efficient and powerful leader of men, who could hold his nation as in the hollow of his hand or lead it whither without him it would not have gone. Such kings are exceptions; accord- ing to one modern theory of constitutional government they are held to be not even desirable in ordinary times. The constitutional king is the personification of his people. He speaks with their voice; he acts for them; he stands for them in the sight of the world. He performs these functions only in his public capacity. In private Hfe he may be what he pleases, provided that the public is un- aware. All that the public can of a certainty know of him must conform to the public sentiment. He must at any rate appear to feel as the public feels on all occasions. His known acts must conform to the public will. The 114 Crowd- Representatives king, therefore, is not an individual but himself a crowd, and not any crowd but the particular crowd which is the nation he incorporates. Hence all the apparatus of ministers, ministerial responsibility, and the like, to ensure the conformity of his public words and actions with the sentiment of the crowd. Hence his messages of sym- pathy on the occasion of such tragedies as the public takes notice of. A thousand individuals may be drowned at sea in the normal average number of months, one here one there, the crowd takes no notice; but if a ship goes down and drowns a thousand at one time, the public, feeling its great self perceptibly wounded, cries its regrets and a royal missive gives them expression. So with mining tragedies: each day takes its toU, and even the local newspapers scarcely record the recurring deaths of units, though in a year their total number far exceeds that of those slain iu great accidents. But let a great accident kill at once enough men to look like a crowd, the pubhc feels the woimd, and its royal spokesman expresses the public emotion. So when a crowd-representative dies the public is again moved, because it is wounded, and there follows a more or less public funeral with royalty present in person or by attorney. Again when the King opens Parliament or performs some such public function, he acts for the crowd and marks the nature of the occasion as one affecting the organised social body. When Milton published "Para- " dise Lost " no king proclaimed the event, nor would it seem congruous for royalty to take official notice of even the greatest achievement of an independent non-represen- tative individual. The publication by Darwin of the 115 The Crowd in Peace and War "Origin of Species " was a far more important event in the world's history than, let us say, the opening of docks at Liverpool; but the one was the act of an individual addressing individuals, the other the concern of a crowd: hence the propriety of the intervention of royalty to give public recognition in the latter case but not in the former. If sin be defined as an action done by an individual to the detriment of the crowd to which he belongs, and the largest category of sins is certainly of that sort, it foUows that an individual who in fact incorporates his crowd and cannot act but in conformity with it, cannot sin. A king, therefore, can do no wrong when he is acting publicly as king; whilst constitutional securities prevent him from publicly acting in any other way. Thus too the Pope is of necessity infallible, from the point of view of his crowd, when he speaks ex cathedra and de fide, that is to say under the restrictive control of all those securities which in fact provide that he shall voice the sentiments of the crowd which he officially incorporates. His infallibiUty cannot, ex hypothesi, extend beyond the limits of the crowd for which and, by which he speaks, like the infalli- bility which in the law courts belongs to a final Court of Appeals, the difference being that the one appHes to the domain of faith, the other to the domain of affairs. But faith is the principal affair of a church, so that the analogy between the two is complete. The judgment uttered is for men to guide their actions by; as to its soundness the future will more or less impartially decide. The murder of a king is a more heinous offence than the murder of an ordinary individual, because it is a more direct injury done to a crowd, and this is true whether 116 Crowd- Representatives he be a hereditary or an elected monarch. Here is the opinion of a prominent American statesman on the sub- ject, regarded from his own local point of view: — "There is no conceivable crime so atrocious as the causeless "murder of the chosen ruler of a free people. Such crimes rise "infinitely higher than crimes against the individual. They "are crimes against hmnanity, civilisation, and the coxmtry's "hfe; against society, law, and hberty. They are a blot upon "free institutions, a stain upon the flag. They undermine the "happiness and well-being of the people. They lower our "standing and character in the opinion of mankind. They are "blows aimed at the Presidency and self-government; at the "town meeting, the state, and the nation; at all our institutions, "and everything which finds expression in the words 'Our "'Country.'" What moved this gentleman's indignation was not the destruction of an individual's life or the grief thereby brought on other individuals who loved him, but solely the wound inflicted on the crowd. Every word of his invective is directed against one who injures a crowd, not one who merely slays a man. As crowd-opinion determines the relative heinousness of this or the other crime, it naturally estimates as worse the crimes done against itself. From the individual's point of view murder is alike murder whoever is killed, but the crowd of course thinks otherwise. I have often wondered what his national crowd comes in process of time to look like to a king, who is always blared at by it with the same anthem, always halloed at with the same cheers; who always beholds it under the flutter of flags, lined along streets, or massed in open 117 The Crowd in Peace and War places; who always addresses to it the same platitudes and receives from it the same reactions. Once, indeed, during a few days it fell to my lot in a foreign country to be in the immediate neighbourhood of royalty during a national festival, and to behold the crowd as they beheld it and practically from their standpoint. Its astonishing uniformity of appearance was what struck me. It was an extraordinarily loyal crowd to look at, and always shouted when the king and queen were in sight. There was no apparent variation in its aspect or its behaviour. It possessed one emotion and one only. But I could not fail to observe the great respect with which its sovereigns treated it. Their deep obeisances to it from the palace balcony overlooking a vast city square were even more profound than those with which they themselves had just been saluted by the courtiers assembled in the room that opened on to the balcony. In fact both salu- tations were given to the same entity, for it was the nation incorporated in the sovereigns that the courtiers saluted, and it was a specimen portion of the nation itself to which the sovereigns did their large courtesies. A Judge, when on the bench, is another type of crowd- representative. In pronouncing judgment upon an of- fender he speaks with the voice of the pubhc; but in order that he may surely do so he is surrounded by all manner of securities and limitations. The opinions ex- pressed by a judge in private life possess no more authority than those of any other educated individual of equal ability. It is only when he occupies the position of crowd-representative and is conditioned by the securities which crowd-organisation supplies that his opinions have 118 Crowd- Representatives the value with which the crowd invests them, as uttered on its behalf and in conformity with its views. Elected representatives of the people are those about whom the pubhc knows most and whose representative capacity they most clearly understand. Some of them have reached the positions they occupy by crowd-com- pulsion, more by crowd-exposition, and yet more by personal relations with leading individuals, who are able to put them forward and procure their election. For when it comes to the act of election, all any crowd can do is to choose between the two or three individuals who have succeeded in obtaining nomination, and efficient nomination is not made by the crowd but by the organ- isers who control it. It follows that amongst the elected personages who represent crowds the large majority pos- sess none of the qualities of crowd-compellers or crowd- exponents. They do not in their heart and nature express its emotions, either because they have imposed theirs upon it or because they have actually absorbed its emo- tions and made them their own. They are merely indi- viduals who have adopted a set of opinions for public and practical use, while their own true opinions remain un- affected, or locked in the privacy of their own hearts. Thus the following conversation is related to have taken place between two famous leaders of their respective parties about twenty years ago. "Has it never happened "to you," inquired the first, "among all your mutations of "opinion, to feel that in fact the principles of our party "are more in accordance with your own views than are "those of the party to which you belong?" "No!" replied the other, "because, of the two, the principles of 119 The Crowd in Peace and War "your party have always seemed to me perhaps a trifle "more inept." Let me repeat that official crowd-representatives are not the same as the crowd-exponents whom we have discussed above. Crowd-exponents are those who in- stinctively voice the emotion of a crowd and do so be- cause they cannot help it. It is the immediate emotion of the crowd that they express, and, as nothing is more fickle, so their expression is chameleon-like in its varia- tion. Nevertheless they themselves are always honest. But the great national public is slower to change in pro- portion to its size, and does in fact possess a foundation of more or less settled opinion. The crowd-representative is called into being, and hedged around with conditions, in order that he may consistently express this settled opinion. According to the representative's position and social func- tion, so are the forces organised about him which com- pel and limit his utterance. Avenues of information are opened to him which put him in direct connection with the crowd itseK. He is in touch with the crowd-exponents and with the whole body of crowd-representatives, so that when he speaks officially he does so with a very much larger brain backing him than that which is contained in his own head. President Wilson's idea seems to be that the head of a nation has no business to do more than voice the already formed opinion of his people. He is not to guide and instruct them, not to show them the way, but chiefly to follow in their wake. "In a democrary," he says, "it is for the people to decide upon national duty. "It is for those who stand at their head to endeavour to "express those things that seem to rise out of the con- 120 Crowd- Representatives "science, the hope, and the purpose of the great body of "the people themselves." One crowd communicates and. deals with another by- means of crowd-representatives, the mode of communi- cation being described as diplomacy. The term is gen- erally confined to relations between nations, but in fact all negotiations between crowds are of the kind called diplo- matic. There is as much diplomacy in dealings between organised bodies of masters and men as between nations. Even the communications between two cricket clubs in. the matter of arranging matches are diplomatic. Like quaUties are needed in negotiators, whether named secre- taries or ambassadors. It is merely the field of action that is larger or smaller; the character of the action is the same whenever two crowds are in communication with one another. Seeing that crowds are not of the same kind as individ- uals, but are beings of another sort, they are not governed by the same principles of action nor by the same moral law as individuals. It follows that the relations of crowds are not like those of individuals, and that not all the tests of honour, truthfulness, candour, and the hke, by which the relations of individuals to one another are judged, apply to the relations of crowds. If Machiavelh did not understand the nature of crowds, he at any rate truth- fully perceived the conditions imder which diplomacy is carried on by crowd-representatives, and nothing needs to be added to his exposition of that matter. International politics are substantially to-day what they were in the sixteenth century, except in so far as the whole of human- ity has since then proceeded — a very short distance — 121 The Crowd in Peace and War toward the organisation of a world-controlling public opinion. The utter feebleness of that restraint upon nations is pathetically demonstrated by the ruins of Louvain and the battered cathedral of Rheims. Among men of honour it is recognised that to dupe a fellow-man is a mean and disgraceful action. To dupe, however, has often been one of the great aims of diplo- macy. Hear what Frederick the Great had to say about it. "Comme parmi les hommes Ton est convenu que 'duper son semblable etait une action criminelle, Ton a 'ete oblige de chercher un autre terme qui adoucit la ' chose, et c'est le mot de Politique que Ton a choisi inf al- 'liblement. Ce mot n'a ete choisi qu'en faveur des 'Souverains, parceque decemment Ton ne peut pas nous 'traiter de coquins et de fripons; quoi qu'il en soit, voici 'au vrai ce que je pense sur la Politique." The reason why you cannot treat as a rascal a king acting officially is because he is a crowd, and you " cannot bring an indict- "ment against" a crowd. A crowd may and often does act viciously or wickedly from the point of view of indi- viduals, but it is not subject to the laws or to the morals which restrain individuals, nor can it be punished in the same way. Hence crowds and their official representa- tives as such stand outside the ordinary moral law, and so therefore does diplomacy in the present condition of the world. Thoughtless persons sometimes talk about the behaviour proper to a Christian nation. There is no such thing as a Christian nation; there are only Christian indi- viduals. The Christ that shall save the nations has not yet been revealed to them. When wars cease for ever His coming will be at hand. 122 Crowd- Representatives Besides the crowd-representatives who are born and bred to the business, or those, like judges, diplomatists, and the like who are educated and selected for the posi- tions they have to fill, there is also the large body of rep- resentative men who, as we have just noted, are merely elected by different kinds of constituencies for the posi- tions they have to fill. These men are not prepared for those positions by any system of education, nor are they any longer taken from a class of men so prepared by birth and bringing up. It is quite possible for any active and pushing individual with a glib tongue to thrust him- seK forward into public notice, and sooner or later he will find some way to enter pubhc life in a representative capacity. This casual and unscientific system has been suffered to come into being, and to maintain itself under present circumstances, because we live in a time of great crowd-selfconsciousness and crowd-power. The only way in which a crowd can operate is through representatives who act in harmony with its views; and the system, not so much of election, but of re-election at relatively fre- quent intervals, secures the subservience of the represent- ative individual to the crowd he represents, and thus gives dominion to the crowd in proportion to the power of its elected representatives. We shall have more to say on this matter when we come to deal with the question of government. Here we have only to consider the effect of his representative position on the representative himself. In the first place the whole process of candidature is a great education to him. He has frequent opportimities of addressing the constituent body, and on every occasion 123 The Crowd in Peace and War it is his business to make the crowd feel that he is one in heart with it. Its reaction upon him is therefore liable to be much stronger than his action upon it, for the crowd before him does not derive many of its passions from him, but rather from the newspapers and from other agencies that form and spread public opinion, his own speeches (unless he be of the rare crowd-compelling sort) having but small formative power on the views of the crowd compared with the power exercised by the great drifts and pressures of national and local opinion. It follows that the candidate is more markedly fashioned by the constitu- ency than the constituency is modified by the candidate; so that after the operation has been continued through a sufficient length of time the candidate may as a rule be expected to emerge "a good party man," who can be reUed on to conform in all his public statements and known acts to the party standards. He thus comes to be in fact the incorporation for practical purposes of his crowd, and may grow to be regarded as almost identified with it. It is said, and said with truth, that "the significance of shak- ' ing hands with a Senator of the United States is that it 'is a convenient and labour-saving way of shaking hands 'with two or three million people. The impressiveness ' of the Senator's Washington voice, the voice on the floor ' of the Senate, consists in the mystical undertone, — ' the chorus iu it, — multitudes in smoking cities, men and ' women, rich and poor, who are speaking when this man 'speaks, and who are silent when he is silent, in the 'government of the United States." Such does the elected crowd-representative appear in the public eye, and such the public believes him to be. 124 Crowd- Representatives In actual fact, in the privacy of his own home, he may be an altogether different person from the public character he plays. But he must so play the character as to deceive the constituency; hence what Mr. Bonar Law has called "the make-believe that is part of the daily life of all poli- " ticians." He may in fact be immoral, a gambler, a drunk- ard, a terror in his home, or vicious in one or more of a thousand ways; but as long as his actions are not officially known, not pubhcly stated in a form which the law of Ubel can deal with, so long may his constituency remain blind, and be content to hold him as a model of all the virtues and prejudices it applauds. So again a man may cherish in private what religious opinions or vacuum of opinion he pleases. In public the mere crowd-represen- tative will have to conform so far as to satisfy public opinion. Take for instance a newspaper of high class — let us say the "Times." It has a definite attitude toward religious questions and may be relied on to express in its editorial columns certain views in relation to them. Does anyone suppose that those are the private views of the proprietors, editors, and writers of the paper? They may be or they may not; the only thing certain about them is that they are supposed and indeed known to be the views of the public that reads the paper, and probably also more or less of the actual writer employed to set them forth. Just as a newspaper has to voice the views of its pubhc, so does an elected representative man. Rare is the person who can openly adhere to his own opinion, when it is not the opinion of his constituency, and who can yet maintain himself as its accepted representative. So Lord Morley did for a time at Newcastle when there was an 125 The Crowd in Peace and War acknowledged divergence between him and his supporters on the question of the Eight-hour day. That such a divergence should long continue between a constituency and its representative is not often desirable. Usually one should convert the other or they should separate; but this consideration is beyond the scope of the present chapter. 126 CHAPTER IX . CROWD-ORGANISATION REFERENCE has already been made at several points of our investigation to the different de- grees of organisation which a crowd is capable of. Let us now for a brief space fix our attention directly on that question. The organisation of a crowd has three main purposes: to secure some degree of continuity and persistence to its emotions* to provide it with a substi- tute for the brain which it lacks, and to give it executive power, that is to say, power to give effect to its emo- tional desires and ideals in the region of human accom- pHshment and evolution. An unorganised crowd or mob is purely destructive; it is without power to create or upbuild. A mob can de- stroy individuals, other mobs, or the work of men's hands. It can rush headlong like a mad creature upon an enemy and fight with the fury of a wild beast, yet even so it is very inefficient; a much smaller group of disciplined units can overpower it with relative ease, as a small body of police constables is able to demonstrate whenever called upon. Organisation therefore not merely directs the power of a crowd to some definite end, but greatly increases its efficiency. No crowd, however, can organise itself. It must be organised by individuals who acquire its confidence or 127 The Crowd in Peace and War are able to impose their authority upon it. They may or may not be themselves moved by its emotions, though their authority will finally rest on the belief of the crowd that they are so. For it is only by possessing a common emotion that a crowd comes into being, and the main purpose of those who would organise, control, and direct it is to kindle and maintain that emotion at a high tem- perature and over a long period of time. But to main- tain among the multitude that kind of steadfast volition which wUl tranquillize every mental tiunult in the indi- vidual unit presupposes the infusion of a high ideal. This is the end of all noble propaganda and of all proud national tradition. It is their high purpose, whereunto all consti- tutions, patriotic and political enthusiasms, pride of race, esprit de corps, and the like emotions are to be cherished. " Palton he wasti!" (for the batallion), cries the Gurkha and charges joyously to his death. " For God and King ! " "For Fatherland!" "Pour la France!" " England expects every man to do his duty ! " - — all are beneficent crowd- cries, constraining the unit to high and noble deeds. The individual is guided by a complexity of motives. The crowd follows not motives but sentiments and ideals. Only an ideal can concentrate the desires of many into a common all-embracing effort; and ideals are kindled rather than taught. An individual may have a definite and reasoned purpose in what he does. A crowd has an emotional aim. The crowd-units, whatever their indi- vidual purposes in life, must, in so far as they belong to the crowd, sacrifice them in the interests of the emotional aim. He that loseth his separate individual life in the life of a crowd shall find another life in that. A crowd 128 Crowd- Organisation which cannot control its members to the common end will fail for lack of the organisation by which alone that control can become efficient. Germany has given the world an example for all time of how the millions of a people can be organised and brought to act together for a common emotional end — Deutschland iiber AllesI The contrast is indeed great between the broken, humiliated German states after the battle of Jena and the unified, mighty, and efficient Empire that declared war on the world in July, 1914. That Empire was possessed by a single ideal — its own expan- sion. The number of Germans who did not share it were too few to count. By the purpose and compelling force of a succession of leading men the units and sub-crowds of the Germans had been inflamed with a common passion and at the same time organised into a tremendous inte- gral whole, such as ancient Rome alone had dimly fore- shadowed. Every agency had been directed towards the intended result. "Schools, army-discipline, scientific "research, commercial resourcefulness, technical skill, "governmental efficiency, social legislation — all were "well-considered parts of one comprehensive, far-reaching, "imperial programme." Every live nation has some kind of faith in its ideals and confidence in its destiny, but that is very different from a keen clear sense of national pur- pose; the difference lies in the organising brain that obtains control over the emotional but brainless human mass. For just as a cunning and masterful speaker can artfully kindle the enthusiasm of a public meeting and direct it whither he pleases, so can a great statesman obtain control over and direct the organisation of a people, 129 The Crowd in Peace and War and -can train up and direct other individuals to assist and prolong his initiative through a succession of genera- tions. Herein, indeed, consists the difEerence between a statesman and mere pohticians. The pohtician is hke some casual man standing on the deck of a rudderless ship which is proceeding unsteered among winds and currents, whithersoever it happens to head, he from time to time calling out empty orders to steer this way or that but only as he discovers the vessel itseK to be proceeding; a statesman, on the contrary, resembles an able navigator who, directing his course by sun and stars and understanding the forms and forces of nature amidst which the vessel must make its way, steers the ship towards a determined port, using its engines as motive power, but himself actually supplying all the guidance. Every organised crowd realises its own ineflSciency and is ready to accept a leader as soon as one becomes visible to it; even a mere mob thus behaves. This is the veriest rudiment of crowd-organisation. So long as the leader stands alone his position is perilously insecure. Experi- ence has proved that he must have the support of other individuals, themselves in more or less close relation with the whole or parts of the whole body, and out of this experi- ence has now grown the well-understood system which in these days is the normal and probably necessary skeleton of all crowd-organisation, that namely of representative committees, and in the final resort of a smaU executive committee with a more or less authoritative chairman. Committees, by whatever name they are called, are the brains of crowds. It is by them that a crowd thinks; it 130 Crowd- Organisation Is through them that it acts; it is in accordance with their decision that it is governed. A committee may have an acknowledged head by which it is despotically directed, or it may be a small deliberative body in which every mem- ber has some decisive influence. These are details about which the crowd need know nothing and we need not dis- cuss. The essential fact for the crowd is that it should beUeve its executive Committee to be in sympathy with the crowd's own ideals and aims, and able and determined to devise and put into effect means for carrying out the crowd's desires. The committee may be called into exist- ence in a variety of ways. Its members may be elected directly or indirectly, or nominated by other crowd-rep- resentatives. These are mere questions of detail. The one essential is that the feelings and aims of the committee as a whole and of the individual members of it, in so far as the crowd is cognisant of them, should be in harmony with those of the crowd itself. The various precautions to keep the crowd and its governing and executive committee in harmony with one another are called the constitution of the crowd, and this constitution may either be plainly set down in words or traditionally understood, preserved, and acted upon. The larger, the older, the better organised a crowd may be, the more elaborate its constitution; but without a constitu- tion of some kind not even a cricket club can long exist. I have known a dining-club without a constitution, but that merely meant that it did what its President decreed, and he was not really free to decree this or that according to his own whim, but preserved in his mind what he knew to be the habits and preferences of the members, even as 131 The Crowd in Peace and War the Common Law of England is said to reside in the bosom of a judge. The degree of a crowd's organisation is not, however, only to be measured by the elaboration of its constitution, but even more by the power to control the action of indi- vidual units conceded to the executive by the general body. The Democratic theory of government in the United States is that the ultimate source and reservoir of power is and remains the individual citizen, who pos- sesses all the rights that he has not parted with to the town-meeting. The town-meeting in its turn possesses all the rights that it has not parted with to the County, the County those it has not parted with to the State, and the State all the rights that it has not parted with to the Federal Body, which in its turn possesses those powers and rights only which it has thus constitutionally received. The European theory of government, 'on the contrary, is that all rights reside in the sovereign, and that subordi- nate assemblies and individual subjects possess only such rights as the Government has delegated to them by con- stitutional enactment or acknowledged tradition. In practice both theories work out to the same result, and the individual is under a like compulsion to do and abstain from doing a great number of acts. In process of time the organisation of so-called civilised national crowds has become very elaborate, more so in some states such as Germany, less in others such as England. In proportion to the completeness of the organisation is the power and efficiency of the collective body. What is true of nations is true in a less degree and mu- tatis mutandis with all other crowds. The more elaborately 132 Crowd-Organisation and strongly they are organised, the more persistent are their ideals and the more efficient is their collective action. The Church of Rome is more efficiently organised than the Church of England, and is to that extent more power- ful in its collective action. The one can restrain where the other cannot. The one is potent for good or evil where the other is impotent. Many of the Free Churches are less elaborately organised than is the Church of Eng- land and their efficiency for public action is thus feebler. I once became cognisant of circumstances which mani- fested this difference of efficiency in a very remarkable manner. It was in an English city which was visited with a serious misfortune, whereby multitudes of the poorer classes were put to great hardship and distress. A large public fund was at once subscribed to meet the im- mediate need, and the administrators of the fund were faced with the problem of how the money should be dis- tributed, and that immediately. It became at once appar- ent that the Church of England alone possessed in full working order the required organisation. It alone had a parish system with district visitors apportioned to every group of houses in the poorer parts of the town — officers, that is to say, aheady cognisant of the circumstances of practically every poor family in the affiicted area. They, and they only, could efficiently administer the relief, and to them the duty was assigned, with the unanimous con- sent of the representatives of all the denominations who had together co-operated to raise the fund. Of course all sects helped in the distribution, but the active distributing agency was and had to be the parish workers of the Church of England. 133 The Crowd in Peace and War The most powerfully organised crowds that exist are those formed by their executive under authority delegated to them by the whole body of a people. Such are the army, the navy, the police, and so forth. No efficient army elects its officers; it is the official class that selects the men. Here the organisation proceeds from above downward, not from below upward. It follows that here the organic relation of parts to the whole is complete. In theory no freedom whatever is left to the individual. Discipline is the name of the agency by which this organic unity is attained; and it is in fact discipline that makes the difference between a regiment and a mob. Drill is merely the agency by which discipline is inculcated, and that, not the shapely performance of manoeuvres, is its true purpose. So long as a mob is filled with a common impulse it may act as a unit, but the moment the common impidse wavers the mob has no nerves or brain to bring it back into corporate integrity. Discipline is the means whereby nerves are given to a crowd, enabling it to be under the direction of a single brain. A disciplined crowd obeys and cannot help obeying its official leader and his official subordinates whoever they may be. An unorgan- ised crowd only follows a hypnotising crowd-compeUer or crowd-exponent. Discipline inevitably begets rank. Only where organi- isation is low does equality actually, not merely theoreti- cally, exist. The whole purpose of military organisation is to group units together under the direction of superiors of successive ranks, and thereby to substitute for mere bhnd crowd-instincts the directing brain of an individual. When two armies join in battle the object of each is not 134 Crowd-Organisation the mere slaughter of the other's units but the destruction of its organisation, which, if accompUshed, turns the defeated body from an organised collectivity into a mob, it being universally true that a mob in the presence of a disciplined force is a thing impotent, terror-stricken, and incapable of resistance. Whilst the units of an army are thus seen to be, in the main except under special circumstances, without initiative and altogether subordinate and obedient to their officers, no such complete abnegation of individuality is called for in turn from them. Every officer in relation to his supe- riors no wise differs from the men in respect of submission to orders and completeness of discipline; but an officer in relation to the men he commands can avail himself of all the powers of leadership, of crowd-compulsion, which he is capable of wielding. For over and above the disci- pline which makes men obey orders there is in an army, as much as in any other crowd, the capacity for that kind of high enthusiasm which enables iudividuals to act under its compelling influence, as without it they could never have acted. Real commanders of men are those who, whether they be subalterns or generals, are able to raise this heat of passion in. their men and thus intensify their power Ludividually and collectively many fold. It is for this reason that, as Kinglake observed, the harangues which seem to touch soldiers do not often embody a new and lofty conception, but utter some thought which comes within the reach of all. Thus by merging each man's emo- tion in the aggregate feeling of the regiment, the brigade, or the army, they make opinion set one way with all the volume and weight which can be given to it by a multitude 135 The Crowd in Peace and War of human souls when they bend their whole forces in one direction. Where a crowd is to be organised to accomplish a fixed and definite result through the employment of physical force in the ultimate resort, there is no other type of organi- sation so efficient as the military. This is why the organi- sation of poUtical parties approximates more and more closely to the military form in proportion as party-aims become definite and narrow, and the intention is to give effect to them even by force if possible. Thus the Irish Home Rule Party, which aimed at attaining one result, and that simple, definite, and by all its adherents well understood, before it had been long in existence came to approximate to the mihtary form under the able direction of Mr. Parnell. In theory indeed the party elected its leaders, but in practice the leader selected all the officials of the party. In practice also the rank and file were under severe discipline and disobeyed the orders of their leaders at their own peril, even peril of life. No other such dis- ciplined poKtical party has in modern days existed in Great Britain, nor has any ever had the efficiency or maintained over so long a period the singleness of its aim. This was because Mr. Parnell was not merely a crowd-compeUer of exceptional force, but because he Hkewise possessed in a high degree the genius for crowd-organisation, and so im- pressed his system upon the body of his supporters that, even when he himself lost control, the party he had shaped regained its equilibrium, like a disturbed gyroscope, and continued to revolve about the axis he had fixed for it. 136 CHAPTER X GOVERNMENT AND THE CROWD IN the preceding chapter it was necessary to encroach somewhat upon the subject with which we have now to deal, seeing that Government is an essential part of the organisation of a national crowd, and may be said to resemble the skeleton of the whole structure. It is obvious that man, the individual, will regard govern- ment differently from his twofold point of view: as a crowd-unit, and as an independent living creature. Simi- larly the governing body or sovereign may regard the governed from the same two points of view, as a pubUc or as a multitude of individuals. We have had expe- rience of legislation intended to promote directly the weU-being of individuals, and of other legislation which regarded only classes. Finally the power which govern- ments wield and by which they impose their will upon a people may be supplied by organised crowds or by the assent of a multitude of imorganised individuals. These general considerations wiU suffice to suggest what large questions are opened when we propose to discuss the interrelations of crowds and governing individuals or bodies. Broadly speaking, the governments of the peoples of the world from the beginning till now may be divided into two classes: Kingdoms and Crowddoms. In the 137 The Crowd in Peace and War one individuals rtiled; in the other public opinion. It matters not how the King be chosen or obtain his office, whether by birth, by murder, intrigue, or revolu- tion, by any of the many forms called of right divine, or by election or selection. I shall call that man in every case a king who exercises his individual vohtion as a ruler over a crowd. Kingdoms and Crowddoms are both very ancient forms, and one is not necessarily older than the other; for, though throughout the ancient and mediaeval worlds the headship of almost every state except a very few was held by an individual who looked like a king, it not infrequently happened that he was only the executive officer of public opinion and had little or no power of imposing his own individual will on the people he was supposed to rule. Writers upon theories of government have sometimes taken the liberty of transporting themselves and their readers into unrecorded, prehistoric times, where by aid of imagination alone they have described how government arose, based upon "social contract" and other the hke pictured foundations. Without attempting any such leap into the dark unknown past, it may be permissible to inquire what would be the needs of a number of inde- pendent individuals unlinked to one another by any laws or agreements but living within range of one another. Clearly they would be twofold: the need for co-operative protection and co-operative action. By uniting together they could provide protection for the persons and prop- erty of all, at far less inconvenience and labour than each household would have to suffer or employ to safe- guard itself against all comers. By co-operation again 138 Government and the Crowd not only warlike attack but various forms of labour can be more efficiently accomplished and at less cost; and some works, such as irrigation, can only thus be accom- pUshed at all. Both for common protection and for ele- mentary forms of common enterprise the organisation required is of the type known as military, and a military organisation can be most easily and quickly accomphshed and afterwards maintained, under the direction of a single head or kiug. But a crowd has already to possess a common feeling before it can thus be organised, and the common feeling makes it conscious of and interested in itself, as all crowds are and must be. Where pubhc opinion exists and common emotions are felt, ideals take shape; and the body politic has a life of its own, a life longer, larger, and quite different in kind from the life of the individuals who collectively and successively compose it. To travel down the long course of history sorting out Kingdoms and Crowddoms would be an interesting but a lengthy adventure. The reader will easily perceive for himself that in many an early patriarchal system of gov- ernment the power of tribal opinion was very strong; that many a priest-king (of whom instructive and enter- taining details may be read in Sir James Frazer's "Golden Bough") had little individual authority; and that, long before any definitely republican form of government had been devised, there existed many a Uttle state in which the real source of authority was not the will of an indi- vidual but the desire of the crowd. All this follows from the twofold nature of man, the gregarious and the non-gregarious attitudes which he 139 The Crowd in Peace and War assumes toward his fellows according as circumstances impel him. Where people live in close proximity to one another, as in a town, the gregarious element predomi- nates and the crowd obtains control. Where people live in scattered homesteads, crowd-qualities lie dormant within them, and the individual is content in the maia himself to look after his own interests. This is still true down to the present day. Thus Mr. Mundella, whose passion was the development of a democratic system of education under popular or crowd-control, made the following significant observation: "Whilst," he says, "it 'seems almost impossible to get the counties to levy a 'county rate for technical education, the municipal bor- ' oughs within the county are fairly willing to rate them- ' selves for their own benefit, and the smaller urban 'townships have eagerly incurred heavy burdens when 'assured that they themselves would reap the profit of 'their expenditure. We have here, if we realise it, a 'measure of the areas within which local patriotism in 'educational matters is effective in a greater or less 'degree." This is really a priceless passage, every sen- tence and almost every phrase of which would afford subject for entertaining analysis, but we are now con- cerned only with the observation it records, to wit that it is in towns, where people are congregated, that the crowd- emotion is strong, and socialistic measures can be carried into effect with public assent; but in the country, where people live at some distance from one another, public opinion is weak and socialistic arrangements are unpopu- lar. That is why recent socialistic legislation, all of which is begotten in towns and passed into law by town-represen- 140 Government and the Crowd tatives (speaking broadly), nowadays usually contains provisions enabling the central authority to impose on recalcitrant, mainly country authorities, though popularly elected, the necessity of carrying into effect and paying for a number of provisions which no coimtry population would ever willingly adopt. It follows therefore that, generally speaking, the in- tensity of the crowd-spirit is proportioned to the density of the population. Where economic or other conditions bring a great number of people together and cause them to live in close proximity to one another, there the indi- vidual tends to be merged into a crowd; there the crowd becomes conscious of its separate existence, its needs and desires other than those of the individuals composing it, and presently of its power to coerce the individual and make him labour and pay, not only for himself and his family, but also for the so-called common good. It was in the ancient city states that crowd-dominion first openly and plainly took shape. It was in them that the indi- vidual ruler — the wise man, the strong man, the typical king — was first openly tabooed and reduced from lord- ship to service. It was in them that the condition, quaintly misnamed Liberty, was first proclaimed — the Liberty for example by possession of which the Athenians slew Socrates! In the Middle Ages it was in the towns that this same Liberty again appeared, and power passed once more into the hands of other crowds and from those of various kinds of kings, the difference to the individual being that in the one case he had to obey the orders of some sort of public, in the other the orders of an individ- ual ruler. 141 The Crowd in Peace and War Of course when the pubUc rules, there is a probability that the individual citizen will be more or less of one mind with it, seeing that it is a crowd, possessing all the qualities that we have seen to belong to a crowd, one of which is the infective quality of the general opinion. Hence, as I have said, the individual citizen runs a good chance of being infected by whatever enthusiasm moves the crowd and therefore of desiring what the public desires; consequently he may be expected to find himself in agreement with the general tendency of legislation and administration when that is determined by public opinion. But an individual, strong and independent enough to escape crowd-dominance over his miad, and able to form his own opinions for himself, wiU probably be out of har- mony with public opinion all or most of the time, and for him and all like him (the strongest and best class of folk anywhere and at any time) crowd-dominance will be not less but much more objectionable than the despotism of a king. For majority rule, that is to say crowd-rule, may be just as despotic as, and often has been more despotic than, the rule of a king has ever been. More- over crowd-representatives openly claim the right so to domineer, as kings have seldom dared. Here is a plain statement by a democratic pohtician of modern type, the Hon. Stafford Bird of Tasmania. "He who was the "strongest, who could bring the greatest number of clubs "and spears in stalwart hands into the field; he who "could show the greatest fighting prowess, who could "best handle big battalions and big guns, obtained thereby "the right to rule. . . . The gospel of democracy is that "those who can run the biggest crowd into the polling booth 142 Government and the Crowd "shall be the governors of the country." The man who does not share the emotions of the majority and is out of harmony with pubHc opinion needs protection from crowd-despotism even more than ever a subject needed protection from the power of a king. Between Kingdoms and Crowddoms there exists the same hostility as between the really free individual and the thoroughly incorporated crowd-unit, and the like is true of regal despots and crowd-representatives. Des- potic monarchs, and especially the wisest and ablest, are naturally out of sympathy with the aspirations of a crowd and are incredulous of the value and efficiency of crowd- government. If any man was "every inch a king," it was Bismarck, who really ruled his country with a power seldom surpassed. It would be easy to cite contemp- tuous and hostile opinions of his as to the merits of crowd-government. But in this he merely carried on the traditional and indeed necessary attitude of kingship toward crowd-domination, which never received a nar- rower and more emphatic expression than' in the following two articles of the Treaty of Verona (22 Nov., 1822), wherein are authoritatively set forth the essen- tial points of difference between individual and crowd rule: — "Article I. The high contracting parties being con- 'vinced that the system of representative government is 'as incompatible with monarchical principles as the 'maxim of the sovereignty of the people is with divine 'right, engage mutually, and in the most solemn manner, 'to use all their efforts to put an end to the system of 'representative government, in whatever country it may 143 The Crowd in Peace and War "exist in Europe, and to prevent its being introduced in "those countries where it is not yet known. "Article II. As it cannot be doubted that the liberty "of the press is the most powerful means used by the "pretended supporters of the rights of nations, to the "detriment of those of priuces, the high contracting "parties promise reciprocally to adopt all proper meas- "ures to suppress it, not only in their own states, but also "in the rest of Europe." It is rather strange that this document, which singles out the danger to kingdoms of a free press, makes no mention of the right of public meeting; for these are the two legs on which Crowddoms stand. By pubUc meet- ings and popular journalism crowds are imtiated and built up. Where public meetings are effectively prohib- ited and there is no free press, it is difficxdt, almost im- possible under normal conditions, to form a free crowd even locally, and without a free popular press great national crowds or parties cannot be buUt up. PubHc meetings and a popular press are the two chief sources of crowd power and the two chief enemies of individual rule. Government is representative when the members of its executive and legislative bodies are not merely elected by, but are amenable and responsible to, public opinion. When that is the case the crowd really rules. This, of course, imphes that the members of the government are all of the type of crowd-exponents or crowd-representa- tives above discussed, except on the rare occasions when a crowd-compeller appears and for the time acts a kingly part. When a government, of whatever shape, produces a crowd-compeller for its head, it is not, so long as he is 144 Government and the Crowd in control, really representative; for public opinion then is what he makes it; it does not make him. The normal representative ruler or ruling class is made by crowd- opinion and carries out a crowd's behests. It follows that in undiluted representative government there is no place for reason, none for science, none for experience, none, in fact, for what we call "experts." Let me again cite the priceless Mundella. "There is talk," he says, "of the need of experts. Well, the proper place for the "'expert' is as the servant and not the master of the "public." So that even an expert in governing is to be excluded from government, and the whole business is to be handed over to a body of representatives, mainly amateurs. Nothing could be more precise. The crowd is moved wholly by emotion, the expert by knowledge. In crowd-rule emotion is to give the law. Unless reason can, as how seldom it does, translate itself into an emotional form and obtain control of the passion of the crowd, reason is to be excluded and emotion is to decide. There is no escape from the conclusion that crowd-government, government by public opinion, government by the crowd for the crowd, must of necessity possess all the qualities which belong to the crowd and which we have discussed in preceding chapters. It must be intolerant, it must be despotic over the individual, it must aim at reducing all to the common form of crowd units, it must be passionate, variable, now keen in one direction, now in another. It was recorded in the " New York Nation " a few years ago, how, just before the passage of the Roosevelt Railway Bill, a Senatorial champion of it was privately declaiming on its inevitability. "I tell you, sir, that when the American 145 The Crowd in Peace and War "people rise in their might and demand a law of this kind, "there is no withstanding their will." "Well, Senator," asked a bystander, "what will it amount to after it is "passed?" "Nothing whatever," was the prompt reply; "the people will thiak no more of it, and will turn their "minds to the next agitation." Mr. Keir Hardie, an apostle of crowd-rule pure and simple, once explained the conditions of its working. The order of proceedings was first to promote a great agita- tion for some measure and then to pass it while the hot fit was on. He said that if by means of delay, caused for example by a second chamber, the public had time to cool down, it frequently changed its mind, and thus you lost your measure. Whether the measure would work, whether the country would like it when it had got it, these considerations did not occur to him as worth notice. His idea was merely one of perpetual agitation, in which the crowd, kept at boUing point with enthusiasm for first this, then another, so-called reform, should maintain a set of representatives in well-paid office to pass laws in haste giving effect to these successive passions. Thus picturing the process of crowd legislation, he was by no means without understanding, for if legislation were ever to become a purely crowd business it is only thus that it could be carried on. The crowd cannot act except through passion. It does not desire to act at all until its passions are raised. That is most easily done by exciting its greed and directing its hostility against some smaller crowd or class, which is the favourite field of action of the demagogue. A crowd may likewise be inspired with enthusiasm for a high ideal. In an im- 146 Government and the Crowd perfect world its good and evil passions are usually min- gled together. Only the individual can proceed by reason. Crowd-rule is passion enthroned. We in England have seen examples enough in oiu" own day of legislation by crowd-passion. Who that lived through it does not remember Mr. Stead's "Maiden trib- "ute" agitation, and the accompanying behaviour of the House of Commons? The passion was not of an ignoble sort; but, as for the legislation it produced, little good did that accomplish. The same kind of phenomena accompanied the passage of the Old Age Pensions Bill. The House itself, being a crowd, is liable to all crowd diseases. On that occasion it was suddenly swept away by a wave of vaguely sympathetic enthusiasm, under the deluge of which it widened the scope of the measiu-e and destroyed many of its sanest limitations. Those present stated that the House was carried away by a passion of generous emotion! Nothing could better indi- cate the nature of a crowd. Members were voting to give away other people's money and taking to themselves the joy and the credit of the giving. Those were mo- ments of undiluted crowd-rule, but they were exceptional. Even to-day, with our new single-chamber government. Great Britain is not subjected to purely representative rulers. The crowd strongly influences but still does not wholly direct our legislation and administration, though its exponents are loudly clamouring for the removal of every restraint that impedes or prevents the entire liberty of the crowd to do and order what it pleases. If pure Crowddoms are unsatisfactory and indeed in the long run impossible, what are we to say of Kingdoms, 147 The Crowd in Peace and War that is of governments not formally but actually directed by a personal king? It is generally admitted that when he is a truly great man, gifted with crowd-compelling power, endowed with wisdom and that kind of instinct and insight that make his choice of human instruments generally right, no form of government is better. What, however, in the long experience of the world has proved to be diflScult, perhaps impossible of attainment, is the invention of a method for discovering and raising to the headship of a people the right kind of man for kingship. I say "perhaps impossible," for such is the generally received opinion; and yet the Church of Rome seems able nowadays to provide itself with a succession of excellent Popes to whom authority can be safely given, and it may be that what a church accomplishes could be accomplished also by a state. Bees breed their queens. The world has tried the hereditary principle in Umited monarchy with tolerable success, but it has never called in the aid of science to direct the breeding of a truly royal race. Perhaps the future will solve the problem after the way of the bees. At present that method is outside practical politics; for, if the perils of crowddom are not nowadays clearly realised, every one knows the danger that a kingdom may develop, hke the ancient Empire of Byzantium, into a splendid and selfish despotism, with an orientahzed court, a decayed public spirit, and stifled individual initiative. The corresponding danger in the case of crowddom has yet to be learnt by modern experience. For our present purposes, at all events, it suflBces that kingship is not an admissible method of government in 148 Government and the Crowd the modern world. Only in Russia and America (in the so-called Republics of Central and South America) does it really exist; to some extent also in Germany. The Czar, however, may be less of a true king than he appears; as to the future of German Imperialism, who at this time of writing would venture to prophesy.'' South America is really the one continent where true monarchy still flourishes, the Presidents of the various States being as a rule personally supreme and not in fact representative. This tends to support the conclusion that kingship is only possible in politically backward regions, and especially those ia which the population is scattered, communica- tion diflScult, the press weak, and the level of education low. Where ordinary modern conditions prevail the public is a more organised crowd, and demands, and is able to obtain, for better or worse, a position of supremacy or at least powerful iafluence in the government. It has been the good fortune of Great Britain for a long series of years to have produced, and lived under, a con- stitution which was neither a kingdom nor a crowddom, but partook of the nature of both. The crowd obtained a great influence in the government, but various individ- uals altogether independent of and irresponsible to the public, likewise had a share of political power. It was this compromise and balance between the power of the crowd and the power of individuals independent of it which gave to Great Britain, during a century or more, an almost unique position in the world, and enabled the British Empire to grow to its present high estate, as under pure crowddom or pure kingdom it could not have grown. 149 The Crowd in Peace and War The United States also, by the wisdom of the framers of its constitution, provided an important sphere of influence in the government for potent individuals, who, though in form elected, were in actual fact not closely responsible to, nor under the immediate influence of the crowd. Such, for instance, were and still to some extent remain the Federal Senators, and it is to the Senate of the United States more than to any other branch of its govern- ment that continuity of policy, steadfastness to national tradition, and guarded resistance to sudden popular emotion have been judged due. On the occasion of the Spanish-American war indeed the safeguard failed, and the crowd, lashed to fury by a section of the irresponsible yellow press, rushed the country into war, when there was not a single point in dispute which the enemy had not officially expressed willingness to settle to the satis- faction of the United States by friendly negotiation. This is the kind of catastrophe sooner or later too hkely to happen when the crowd dictates foreign policy. Cor- responding ills accompany its unfettered actions in the areas of domestic policy. Both in England and in the United States the crowd during recent years has, under the guidance of its ex- ponents and representatives, put forward claims for a larger and indeed a supreme influence upon government, alike in legislation and administration. It has in many a recent enactment invaded the area properly belonging to courts-of-law and has substituted administrative for legal decisions in matters concerning the rights of indi- viduals. Now claims are openly put forward for the complete dominance of the crowd in all parts of govern- 150 Government and the Crowd ment, and if the steps taken in that direction were to be pursued much further both Great Britain and the United States would become advanced Crowddoms. If man were a purely gregarious animal this order of gov- ernment might suit him well enough. But he is not; not even in cities. A human society in which every individual was as wholly enslaved to the crowd as is a bee to the hive would be an intolerable despotism. A bee all its life long is in imbroken slavery. Every act of its life is done for the hive. Its passion of work is used up in the interests of the commimity, and that not even mainly of the Hving community but of the unborn generation that is to follow its own. There is nothing in nature so horrible as the life in a hive of bees. Their industry is a veritable night- mare of self-abnegation, generation after generation, each for the next. That is exactly and without exaggeration the kind of life that every crowd tends to try to generate among its members and to impose upon them. To such slavery mankind will not long submit, for in the long run perhaps the most vital element in each individual is his ultimate and keen sense of his own separate individuality, and his desire to realise and express it. Moreover the higher a man stands in character, gifts, and acquired excellencies of knowledge and wisdom, among and above his fellows, so much the keener is his sense of differentiation from the crowd, and so much the stronger his desire to escape from crowd thralldom. As it is the ablest men that are thus the most indi- vidual and the most resentful of crowd-imposition, and as one able man can generally outwit a crowd, it follows that crowddoms pure and simple can never long main- 151 The Crowd in Peace and War tain themselves in power against the subtle assaults of individuals. Hence in a stable government both the gregarious and the individualistic nature of the governed units must be regarded, and therefore both crowd-sentiment and independent human reason must find their spheres of action in the governing body, and each must be free from the control of the other. They must possess co-ordinate authority. Limited crowddom or limited monarchy alone can possess stability, because only they correspond to the twofold nature of man. It therefore follows that the purpose of government is as much to protect the individual from the tyranny of the crowd as to provide that the tendency and aim of both legislation and ad- ministration shall be in general harmony with the emo- tional direction of the public, not indeed at this or that moment, but over a reasonably extended period of time. Nowadays there is no difficulty in providing a fit and clear means of expression for popular emotion. The whole system of elections, parties, and party organisations, has been organised to that end. It has been carried far, but perhaps not yet far enough. In former days (to confine our attention to Great Britain) the House of Commons did not even mainly consist of true representatives of the public. Its members were to a large degree independent of public opinion. Under such circumstances the House of Commons could be a deliberative assembly. Inde- pendent gentlemen, such as many members were in former days, under a loose party system, fall naturally into groups, and it was by negotiations between these groups that majorities were built up or destroyed. But 152 Government and the Crowd now the House tends to become purely representative of popular feeling, and every security that party discipline can invent is being taken to maintain the closest possible connexion between the emotions of the constituencies and those of the House of Commons, at all events toward the time of a General Election. As that recedes into the distance the constituencies may change their wishes and the House may and often does fail to change with them. In so far as that is the case it fails ia the function which it is now supposed to fulfil. Every enlargement of the franchise and every shortening of the length of time be- tween General Elections would tend to make the repre- sentative chamber more and more exactly what it is supposed to be. Universal male and female suffrage and annual general elections are logical developments of the widely current representative theory, nor, so long as the influence and power of the crowd is limited by a co-ordi- nate authority, is there any deadly objection to be taken to such reforms. Indeed, if public opinion is to be one of the main factors in government and legislation, it is obviously desirable that the body whose purpose it is to express that, should in fact express it immediately and clearly. But exactly in proportion to the power of expression thus given to the popular will should be the power of restraint and direction provided for individual wisdom, experience, and foresight. The crowd possesses none of these qualities. It merely desires. It does not follow that its desires are attainable or attainable at once. Granted that the direction of legislation and administra- tion must be in general harmony with the public will; 153 The Crowd in Peace and War the time, the form, and all the details of measures intended to give effect to that will, must be matter for rational discussion and decision; that is to say they must for those purposes be removed from the purview of the crowd and therefore of its representatives. In the past this was accomphshed by the aid of a second chamber, the members of which were not elected and were therefore independent of crowd-control. As crowd- exponent speakers were fond of asserting, members of the House of Lords represented only themselves. This was in fact the very raison d'etre and merit of their existence. By the weakness and carelessness of successive adminis- trations or successive generations the House of Lords was allowed to run to seed. No care was taken to purge it of the unfit, none to secure that, where heredity provided an entrance to the assembly, the marriages upon which heredity depended should be of a satisfactory character. The body of peers was allowed to grow too big and ulti- mately the House ceased to perform satisfactorily the business which was its function, and worst of all came to lose faith in itself. When the concurrent authority of the House of Lords, side by side with the House of Commons, was done away with, it might be supposed that crowddom would have come. But, though a long step was taken towards it, there remained certain limitations to crowd-power which still have force. First there was the whole mass of exist- ing statute law and the body of judges who administered it and who are not as a rule amenable to poUtical pres- sure. The hberated crowd-chamber, as I have said, proceeded to undermine this, the main protection 154 Government and the Crowd which individuals possess against crowd-tyranny; but it will take a long time to socialise the law-coiurts, and before that has been accompUshed reaction may be expected. A more subtle barrier against complete crowd-control had also been built up almost unobserved, to wit the privacy of Cabinet deliberations. When, before the Reform Bills, the House of Commons was really a de- Uberative assembly, the Cabinet was a small and relatively weak executive Committee. But with the increased size of the nation, the growing complexity and multitudi- nousness of its life and activities, and the intrusion of popular control into every sphere, the organs of govern- ment multiplied. New offices were formed, new Minis- tries called into existence, and so the Cabinet increased in size. In fact that change took place which we have discussed in earher chapters. The Cabinet grew to be itself a small crowd. From being a mere Committee it became an assembly, and what is more important a secret assembly. As long as it was only an executive committee the secrecy of its deliberations was normal; but when it became an assembly this same secrecy as- sumed a novel importance. For now, though a Minister when he appears in his place in Parliament is constrained to express opinions harmonious with those of his party all over the coimtry, in the secret deliberations of the Cabinet he is under no such compulsion. It is thus not merely possible but certain that within the body of the Cabinet itself parties will form, and as the collective deci- sions of a Cabinet must be made to appear unanimous to the onlooking crowd, it becomes possible for one party 155 The Crowd in Peace and War within the Cabinet to dominate the rest, constraining all to follow its dictation. It may be questioned whether in point of fact the Cabi- net nowadays does not efficiently perform many of the functions of a second chamber, or at least whether it does not contain within itself the germs of a body destined under stress of circumstances to perform that function. Possibly it might be argued that the growing hostility which could be traced in recent decades between the Cabinet and the House of Lords — and that not alone in the case of Liberal Cabinets — was due to the jealousy bound to develop between two rival bodies, both endeav- ouring to perform, but interfering with one another in per- forming, overlapping functions. We have heard much about the reformed Second Cham- ber which is some day to replace the House of Lords. There is one obvious intention with regard to it: it is not to be able to rival or overbear any Cabinet. Moreover it is to be made responsible to public opinion. It is to be crowd-ridden like the House of Commons. It is to con- sist of crowd-exponents and representatives subject to re-election by some kind of popular constituencies. Such a second chamber would of course be superfluous. It is the business of the House of Commons to express the public will, and no second body is required for that func- tion. The only use for a second chamber is to express the mind and intelligence which resides in individuals but which is intrinsically absent from all crowds, constitu- encies, publics, or by whatever name they pass. To invent and set up a second crowd-chamber would be mere super- fluity. But if one were to be created, the only result that 156 Government and the Crowd could follow is the same that would in any case follow if the present constitutional arrangements continued. The Cabinet would acquire the determining qualities proper to a second chamber. It would continue to grow in size and it would inevitably break up into groups. It would jealously protect the secrecy of its deliberations, and it might finally obtain, what it already grasps at, complete control alike over administration and legislation. The popular chamber beside it, tossed hither and thither by every wind and current of mutable public opinion, and incapable of performing dehberative functions, would steadily lose power, and the government of Great Britain would become a more or less elective oligarchy, strong enough to hold the popular chamber under its thumb. We are thus led to the conclusion that the proper func- tion of organised pubhc opinion, that is to say the opinion of the national crowd, is to inspire but not to direct legis- lation. The public feels where the shoe pinches. If the body poUtic suffers from disease, it will know that it is suffering though it may seldom be able to diagnose its own aihnent. The Hmits between emotion and reason are not hard to draw for practical purposes, and they define the areas within which the crowd and all its exponents and representatives can properly act and those wherein only [individual intelligence can operate. But although, therefore, in any system of government which takes account of the actual and unchangeable facts of the nature of man, the impulse toward legislation will normally be given by the pubHc and the form which legislation takes will be the work of men of individual ability, entirely inde- pendent of the crowd, there yet remains one further func- 157 Government and the Crowd final voice, the ultimate Yea or Nay, be not theirs but the people's. Such was the ancient Roman theory of legisla- tion expressed in the words "The Senate has resolved, the "people have decreed." In most modern states Parlia- ment both resolves and decrees, whereas if Parliament really and truthfully reflects its constituent crowd it can- not properly " resolve," whilst if it does not so reflect it, then Parliament has no kind of right to "decree" — man being the twofold creature that throughout these pages we have postulated. In some Swiss cantons the public has retained the right of final direct decision as to the passing or rejecting of legislative measures. This decision is generally given by aid of the ballot-box, but in some small cantons such as Appenzell the actual body of voters is brought together at one place and votes in person, as they may be seen doing in the interesting photograph here reproduced.' The unanimity which generally characterises a crowd physically assembled in one place, after it has had time to become conscious of itself, is clearly apparent even in this small photograph. The submission of measures for final approval to the whole body of voters in a country as large as the United States is a mere matter of machinery, quite possible to organise under modern conditions. Legisla- tion thus achieved after full debate and final public vote would have a binding force beyond legislation passed by any representative assembly. If it be contended that a representative body, resting on a wide enough franchise and renewed at sufficiently fre- ' I am indebted to the Swiss periodical "Heimatschatz" for permis- sion to publish this photograph. 159 The Crowd in Peace and War quent intervals, should be in such close touch with the great public as to render any other direct appeal to the people superfluous, the answer is that under the existing party system, at any rate, this is evidently not the case; for, whereas the whole body of the people might be expected to accept some measures and reject others pro- ceeding alike from a single party government, a body of representatives, responding to the party whip, as supposed agent of the public, would be sure to accept or reject all. There is, of course, a quantity of minor legislation in which the great pubhc is not interested and about which it could not be consulted. Here, for instance, is the record of the doings of the Legislature at Washington during the Congress that closed in March, 1915. 30,053 bills and joint resolutions were introduced: in the Senate 7,751 bUls and 245 joint resolutions, an average of more than 83 for each Senator; in the House 21,616 bills and 441 joint resolutions, or an average of more than 50 for each Rep- resentative or delegate. 700 laws were enacted - — only a httle over 2 per cent of those introduced. 417 of these enactments were public laws, 283 were private measures. It is obvious that such a flood of legislation must pass through a representative conduit and cannot by any possibility be submitted by Referendum to the judgment of the whole people. For great measures of national reform, which affect the structure of the nation and are in fact constitutional innovations, a legislative chamber has no great value, except to register the will of the people and provide opportunity for expert individual minds to set forth that will in a form adapted to accomplish so much 160 Government and the Crowd of the national desires as under the circumstances of the day can be accomplished. But for minor and private bill legislation and to keep an eye on the national expenditure and the executive actions of government a representative body is obviously needed, and the business of that body is to reflect truthfully and immediately what is actually the public opinion of the moment. Such a body has nothing to do with individual opinion, nothing to do with reason. When brought together it ought itself to be a crowd, the exact image of the nation, only on a smaller scale. As a crowd it can never usefully deliberate. It can only in- spire, accept, or reject, but its inspiration and its de- cisions may be concerned with matters too small in themselves and too numerous to be submitted to the whole pubHc. If the representative body is to reflect truthfully the emotion of the pubhc — the great national crowd — it follows that each individual member should in turn represent a crowd also, that is to say should represent one of the separately existing crowds of which the nation is built up. Such crowds cannot be called into existence by a stroke of the pen. They exist because historical, economic, and industrial conditions have fashioned them. Cities are limited crowds; small towns are crowds; coun- try districts that have been separate units for a long time are crowds. One cannot alter these facts. To cut the country up by a long-division sum into equal electoral areas is not to create so many new and separate crowds. I will cite as a single small example the adjoining cities, Rochester and Chatham. No motorist passing along the main street, continuous through both of them, coidd 161 The Crowd in Peace and War obtain by direct observation the vaguest idea where they divide. By every visible sign they are one city. In fact, however, they are two, with different historical pasts and wholly different municipal character. If you were to cut them into two equal electoral areas, giving a part of Chatham to Rochester, all you would accom- phsh would be the certainty of failing to get from either the true expression of local crowd-opinion. The same thing is true if, in order to enlarge the voting numbers of a town, you make the inhabitants of neighbouring country areas vote as of the town. In the result you get neither the opinion of the country nor that of the town. There is nothing in the nature of a mean or aver- age to be arrived at between the two. The country crowd has one set of emotions, the town crowd another. You might as well seek the average taste of sugar and salt. The foolish notion that anything is accomplished by dividing up a country into equal electoral areas, arose from the false idea that men go to the poUing booth and vote each according to his own reasoned idea of his own indi- vidual interests; whereas they do nothing of the sort. Seeing that the people of any country must of necessity, at our present stage of evolution, be "mostly fools," what would be the value of their reasoned judgment about anything? "In 'Time and Tide,' " said Ruskin, "I "have told my working-men friends frankly that their "opinions, or voices, are 'not worth a rat's squeak,' " nor are the reasoned opinions of any save a very few. Voting, as we have already seen, is not an expression of individual reason but of crowd-emotion, and the foolish are as likely 162 Government and the Crowd as the wise, perhaps even more hkely than the wise, to catch a fine crowd-ideal. Individual opinion has so small a share in voting as to be negligible; and it is as fortunate as it is inevitable that it should be so. We do not want an average of fooKsh opinions, but an integration of popu- lar aspirations. "Le vote de chaque Ladividu," writes George Sand, "n'est pas le vote (by which she means the aspiration) de tous. La veritable adhesion des masses n'existe qu'a la condition du contact des hommes reunis en assemblee, s'eprouvant, s'interrogeant, se livrant les uns aux autres, s'engageant par la publicite des debats et pouvant echapper par la aux influences etroites de la famiUe et aux suggestions passageres de I'interet per- sonnel." The object of an electoral campaign is not merely to throw up a set of representatives, but to give singleness and clearness to the crowd's ideals, to make the various crowds realise and concentrate their aims, and in the fire and passion of the time to transmit their ideals to the representatives they cast up. Such skigle- ness of purpose seldom abides long in any crowd, but the intention of crowd-organisation is to prolong it, and with it the vitality of the crowd itself. The City of London is one crowd, the City of Edin- burgh is one crowd, the county of Essex is a crowd; if you want the national crowd distilled, it is those and the like actually existing component crowds that must be represented, not overlapping sections of them. It follows that the old-fashioned representation by counties and boroughs was a more scientific way of reflecting public opinion in the House of Commons than is the present half-and-half system, and that that in turn is preferable 163 The Crowd in Peace and War to a system of constituencies each containing the same number of voters, cut out of the country at random with- out regard to its pattern. It should be remembered that the emotional complexion of any given crowd depends little, if at all, upon its num- bers. The civic character of London, New York, Phila- delphia, Washington, and smaller cities like Bath or Londonderry, has always been a fairly constant quantity. They change little from one decade to another. Even when a city increases tenfold by steady infiltration of immigrants, its character may alter little. The new- comers, if they come as detached units, quickly receive the local tone and are made as effective agents in carrying on the local spirit as persons born and bred in the place. It is only when a great mass of incomers are of one sort, possessing a strong crowd-character of their own and pre- serving it by contact with one another, that a totally new spirit may be introduced. This is said to have happened to Boston when that old Puritan and characteristically New England city was submerged under a flood of Irish, in volume sufficient to revolutionise the local crowd-character. Thus there is nothing gained by splitting up integral local crowds into sections which have no natural separate existence; on the contrary the representative character of their representatives is weakened. Should London then count for no more than Londonderry in the represen- tative chamber.'' Of course not. Every one reahses that the weight of a member in the counsels of the House of Commons is greater is some proportion relative to the importance of the constituency that returns him, and if the votes of members counted (as they do in some Labour 164 Government and the Crowd assemblies) in proportion to the size of the crowds that returned, them, the desired result would be obtained, with- out the necessity for any redistribution bills or other gerrymandering arrangements. It has been asserted that "a state is in essence a great "joint-stock company with unlimited liability on the "part of the shareholders." The analogy will not hold except in a time of war for national existence, and even then it is only the unlimited hability that all share. A state is essentially a vast crowd, a tremendous human organism, a Leviathan (to use the metaphor of Hobbes). A company on the other hand is not a crowd; it is merely a group of co-operating individuals, each desirous of his own profit and realising that that can only in the special case be obtained by co-operating with others. No one inquires as to the character of his fellow shareholders. You never see a successful company moved by emotion even when assembled in general meeting. The units are not united by emotion. It is only when something goes wrong and when a company does not effect its purpose that a common emotion of any sort arises in a company meeting. The purpose of a company is dividends. The purpose of a nation is the pursuit of ideals. Citizens have to make their living; it is little that any government can do to help them, though in much it can hinder. Every country pursues its ideals collectively rather than its busi- ness. That is what gives dignity to the great crowds. If it were not so, nations would only be great beasts of a pernicious character, and the first aim of civilisation would have to be to break them up. 165 CHAPTER XI LIBERTY AND FREEDOM THE best and latest of all dictionaries of the English language shows how the words I have written at the head of this chapter are vaguely used to carry all sorts of different and even incongruous meanings. Slaves longed for freedom, dissenting bodies claimed it, trades-unions demanded it, subordinate states have gone to war for it, but the freedom or hberty aspired to by these various classes is far from being one condition. For the purposes of the present chapter I propose to dis- tinguish Liberty from Freedom and to employ each word in its separate meaning. The ancient condition of freedom was the opposite to that of bondage or slavery; it was the condition of an individual who could decide the main circumstances of his life for himself. If he had to serve some master for his livelihood, he could at any rate select that master, and his service was given in exchange for something in the nature of wages. He was free to choose whom he would serve, free to starve if he pleased and serve no one, free to save and live at leisure on his savings, free to come and go at the bidding of no one. The word Freedom will here be confined to this kind of individual independence. No man indeed can be absolutely and unlimitedly free in this sense unless he lives, like Robinson 166 Liberty and Freedom Crusoe, alone upon an unpeopled island. Where people live within the range of one another the freedom of each must be Umited by the freedom of others, so that the formula of individual freedom is this: that each indi- vidual is free to do and hve as he pleases in so far as he does not interfere with the corresponding freedom of other individuals. So speaking we regard the individual as an independent unit; the moment, however, he becomes a member of a crowd new limitations to his freedom occur. For every crowd Hmits and must limit the freedom of its members and not merely their freedom of action, but, what is far more serious, their freedom of thought. The crowd being a creature of emotions, and existing by the possession of a common emotion in its units, it is impossible for those units to escape this subordination of the soul. Thus all the citizens of a country are supposed to share alike the emotion of patriotism. A citizen who in time of war should assert that he was not patriotic would find himself in very unpleasant circumstances, if many of his fellow- citizens heard that utterance. A member of a church is supposed to hold the church's faith, and to suffer penalties if he does not. A Hberal is held to accept the ideals of the Liberal party; a member of the Labour party is under the like or even a more severe compulsion; and so it is, more or less, with all the crowds to which men and women belong. Witness the dominion of fashion over so-caUed Society people; or the esprit de corps of the army; or "good form" in a public school. Evidently there is an opposition between the individual and the crowd in this matter of freedom, and he who would retain as much 167 The Crowd in Peace and War individual freedom as possible must be careful to limit within the smallest compass his adherence to crowds. That a political organiser should desire to suppress the individual as a separate political unit is natural enough. My excellent friend Fitzgalahad Jones, for instance, finds himself at a given moment more nearly in agreement with, say, the Liberal party than with its rivals. He is, therefore, induced to join that party, and thenceforward must always vote for its nominees, not merely his own preferences. The day when he does not vote for those nominees he becomes a "traitor." Jones as an individual with a volition of his own is a nuisance to all the organisers who do not know what he will do, and have to spend money and trouble on trying to win his suffrage. If Jones can only once for all be dragooned into a party he need no further be bothered about. How easy would politics become if every one were once for all definitely a party member (as most voters are in the North of Ireland)- Political leaders could then sell the vote of Jones if it pleased them. But look at the question from the point of view of Jones. The advantage of parting with his individual freedom of choice is not so obvious. Present- day Democracy rests on a few organised parties. What would a democracy be like if based on millions of inde- pendent Joneses each of whom decided to vote this way or that as he pleased? The dominion of the crowd would be at an end both for better and for worse. We shall not behold any such revolution in the world as we know it. Thus we must conclude that the crowd by its very nature tends, and always must tend, to diminish (if pos- sible to the vanishing point) the freedom of its members, 168 Liberty and Freedom and not in one or two respects alone, but in all. The crowd's desire is to swallow up the individuality of its members and to reduce them one and all to the condition of crowd-units, whose whole life is lived according to the crowd-pattern and is sacrificed and devoted to crowd-inter- ests. Look at the Salvation Army, for instance, and observe how if it could it would make every one of its members "a good salvation soldier." The type is per- fectly definite and the aim of the organisation is to make each individual approximate as closely as possible to that type. It is immaterial for our present purpose to note that the type in question is superior to that of the ordinary indi- vidual laid hold of, and that therefore the effect of such a change upon each would be a great improvement in his individual character. That is the claim of most crowds; they generally say and think that conformity to their standards is in the interest of the individual, and often the claim may be warranted. All, however, that we are here concerned to record is the fact of the limitations on individual freedom imposed by crowds on their members. Such Umitations will be advantageous in the case of per- sons of low character, but often mischievous in the case of those of fine nature and high capacities. An excellent illustration of this crowd-dominance crops up ui my afternoon paper — the "Westminster Gazette," an organ permeated with the spirit of modern Crowddom. It appears that in certain parts of the country artisans, by drinking too much alcohol, are reducing their capacity of doing their proper work, which happens at the moment to be of great importance to the country at war. Many interferences with liberty are permitted in war time by 169 The Crowd in Peace and War general consent. It is accordingly proposed to put diffi- culties in the way of these drinkers by executive orders. One would suppose that the just way to do this would be to make a list of the drinkers and prohibit their indul- gence. But this is not the way the crowd works. To it every one of its constituent members is like another and all must be drilled and controlled alike. As to the form this control should take, my paper says that "there is a "great variety of alternatives," of which it proceeds to give examples, but the crowd-voice comeS out in its con- cluding sentence "whatever measure is adopted must fall "evenly on all classes, upon club, restaurant, and hotel as "upon the public house." Could anything be more ab- surd.? Lest a gunmaker or a shipbuilder in Glasgow should drink too much, Mr. Asquith must not take a glass of sherry with his lunch at the Athenseum! That is charac- teristic of all crowds in respect of individual freedom, and it is that quality which in the long run produces an accu- mulation of individual hostilities to crowd-rule, and sooner or later ends by upsetting it. We live in days when crowd-dominion over the individ- ual has been advancing at a headlong pace. If things were to go much further in the same direction individual freedom would be dangerously restricted. A man, for instance, goes to Africa, or Borneo, or North or South America, and by hard work succeeds in making money enough to satisfy his needs for the rest of his days. He returns home and is perforce swept into the national crowd, which proceeds to take from him as much of his money as it pleases and to spend it in ways of which he may thoroughly disapprove. If he must not drink in 170 Liberty and Freedom London lest a Glasgow engineer should get drunk, why should not his eating be alike limited? Why not the style and cut of his clothes? Why not the size and character of his house? He must cause his children to be taught at least the minimum of muddled information which the gov- ernment calls education. He must insure for his depend- ents the attention of an ill-educated physician and the administration of drugs known to be useless. If the crowd had its way every mother and every infant would be under the orders of inspectors, regardless of the capacity of the parent. We should all be ordered about in every relation of life from infancy to manhood, and in all our relations with children and servants. Freedom would utterly vanish, and this not because the crowd can arrange matters better than the individual. It cannot. It lacks the individual's brains. The ultimate reason for all this interference is the crowd's desire to swallow up and control the unit. The instinct of all crowds is to dominate, to capture and overwhelm the individual, to make him its slave, to absorb all his life for its service. Hence individual freedom and the crowd are normally, necessarily, and for ever hostile to one another, and no true freedom is possible for the individual imless he can be protected against crowd-dominance. The crowd wiU not wilUngly protect him against itself. Such protection for him must be imposed on it, and this can only be done by hmiting the crowd's right of free self-organisation, in other words it must be effected by the constitution of the crowd — by the national constitution in the case of a country. In the United States a written constitution and a powerful Supreme Court to interpret it do, to some 171 The Crowd in Peace and War considerable extent, effect the protection of the individual. The United States is in fact a limited Crowddom. In Great Britain there is no longer any such assured secu- rity. So long as a number of non-elected individuals possessed a co-ordinate share of legislative authority the individual was protected, if somewhat ineffectually after the House of Lords had been allowed to become a feeble and frightened body. But when the so-called veto of the House of Lords was abolished, even this protection was removed, and all that remained between the individual and the despotic crowd was the body of existing statute law and the judges with power to enforce it. There is nothing, however, to hinder the abolition of this security except the time necessary for passing other legislation, replacing by administrative orders the decision of courts of law in all cases where the interests of individuals clash with the interests of the crowd. Mr. Winston Churchill stated the crowd's claim in naked simplicity when he said, "Whenever private privilege comes into collision with "the public interest the public interest must have right "of way." Thus if I am the owner of a rare and beauti- ful picture, that is obviously a case of private privilege; as obviously it is to the public interest that they should be able to see it. I am therefore to be compelled to show it to them! I would sooner burn it than suffer such compulsion. What is mine I will show if, when, and to whom I please. An individual's private rights are always liable to interfere with some public interest, but all the pleasure of life consists in the possession and jeal- ous maintenance of such rights. If a man does not wish to fight for his country is it right to compel him to do so? 172 Liberty and Freedom Suppose he knows himself to be a constitutional coward. One of the finest musical artists in the world told me that he was a hopeless coward and that nothing on earth could make him face even the noise of the firing of a gun, to say nothing of his dread of a bullet. Why should he be com- pelled to fight for his country? He did not make himself or select his own nerves and character! This is an ex- treme case. In time of war the relation of the citizen to his nation is changed, as we shall see, but in times of peace the limitation of public despotism over the indi- vidual is necessary in the ordinary affairs of life. The only question is where to draw the line. Witness the siUy interference with individuals in the supposed public interest brought about by Building Acts in towns. In- numerable instances of their folly could be cited. The same is true of Education Acts, Insurance Acts, and all other the like interferences with individual freedom, except when that freedom limits the corresponding free- dom of other individuals. No doubt there will always be room for difference of opinion as to the interpretation of this proviso; but the crowd in its desire for dominion is not concerned about any such question. It desires to control the whole life of each of its units and cannot help so desiring. That is the nature of the beast, and it is precisely because that is its nature that it needs to have its powers limited. The despotism of kings has been tried and the experience of mankind showed that unless a king's powers were limited the individual was bound to suffer. Now the despotism of crowds is on trial and a similar experience is arising in relation to them. There exist in fact two separate and ahke inalienable 173 The Crowd in Peace and War rights, that is to say inaUenable without damage to both men and mankind; these are the rights of man and the rights of the people. They are separate and indeed opposed rights. The rights of man are to individual free- dom, protection from violence, his own property, and constitutional guarantees. The rights of the people are to the Umited sovereignty of pubhc opinion. The contest between these two rights was the central feature of nine- teenth-century politics and the tendency has been towards victory for the rights of the people, or in the words of M. Emile Faguet, "la diminution progressive et la "suppression pour finir de toute liberte, de toute slirete " individuelle, de toute propriete, de toute garan tie consti- "tutionelle, de toute resistance a I'oppression." Notwith- standing this modern tendency it none the less remains and always must remain true that, to continue the quo- tation, "L'individu a droit a I'existence et par suite au libre developpement de sa personnalite sous le regime de la Souverainete Nationale aussi bien que sous celui du Droit divin. Ce doit m6me etre le but essentiel de la nation en tant que Peuple Souverain d'assurer cette existence et ce libre developpement. II est done a la fois necessaire et legitime de proteger l'individu, s'il y a Keu, contre le despotisme du Peuple aussi bien que contre celui des rois absolus." Mazzini saw, and as far as he saw, sympathised with what was coming, as is shown by the following passage from his Essay on Carlyle: "That which rules the period "which is now commencing, in all its manifestations; that " which makes every one at the present day complain, and " seek good as well as bad remedies — that which every- 174 Liberty and Freedom where tends to substitute, in politics, democracy for governments founded upon privilege — in social econ- omy, association for unlimited competition ■ — in reli- gion, the spirit of universal tradition for the solitary inspiration of the conscience — is the work of an idea which not only alters the aim but changes the starting point of human activity; it is the collective thought seeking to supplant the individual thought in the social organism; the spirit of Humanity visibly substituting itself (for it has been always silently and unperceived at work) for the spirit of men." It all sounds very plausible, very hopeful. A fallacy, however, hes hidden in the phrase "collective thought." There is no such thing as collective thought. Thought resides only in the individual brain. Individual thought inspired by collective emotion, that is the only prolific power. That alone leads mankind upward along a solid track. Collective emotion uncontrolled by individual thought is merely explosive. Whatever it casts upward presently falls back to the ground again and none the better for its excursion into the inane. Having thus briefly considered the condition of Free- dom and the relation of a free individual to the crowd, we have now to ask wherein what is popularly called Liberty consists, and how far Liberty and Freedom are capable of existing simultaneously in the same society. Now whatever condition the word Liberty implies it must be of a kind consistent with the revolutionary watchwords — "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity!" Liberty, there- fore, must be a condition consistent with a simultaneous state of equality amongst men. But individual freedom 175 The Crowd in Peace and War and equality cannot exist together, for, if all individuals are free, the abler and more gifted will impose their directive authority upon the less able, and heredity will stereotype the consequent inequaUty generation after gen- eration. Equality can only be attained and maintained by the collective despotism of the less able multitude over the more able few, and liberty must be a condition con- sistent with such a despotism. Liberty, therefore, is not the same as individual freedom, but the antithesis to it. Liberty is not freedom to the individual from the dominion of other individuals or from the dominion of crowds. Liberty is freedom for crowds to dominate individuals, freedom for crowds from impediments to their expansion, organisation, and self-realisation. It is not the individual but the crowd that calls for Liberty; it is not in the interest of individual development but in that of crowd-authority that the goddess of Liberty is invoked. Liberty, then, is a poHtical condition, a function of con- stitutions and national organisation. As Hobbes stated: The liberty, whereof there is so frequent and honorable mention in the histories and philosophy of the ancient Greeks and Romans and the writings and discourses of those that from them have received all their learning in the politics, is not the liberty of particular men, but the liberty of the commonwealth." This is not alone true of nations, it is true also of lesser crowds. Thus Bismarck said of the Church of Rome that its clergy in any country "constitute a political institution imder "clerical forms, and transmit to their collaborators their "own conviction that for them liberty lies in dominion, 176 Liberty and Freedom "and that the Church, whenever she does not rule, is jus- "tified in complaining of Diocletian-hke persecution." This demand of the church for liberty is the demand also of all political parties and of every association, which aims at accomplishing an organisation of the national crowd, or any part of it, in order to give effect to some poHtical or social ideal. Labour demanded liberty to organise its crowd, liberty to impose the will of the majority on the minority, liberty to extinguish the individual free- dom of its members. That is what the political demand for hberty always means: liberty for some crowd to enslave certain free individuals. Liberty in this sense implies the possession of three principal rights: the right of assembly and unrestrained speech, the right to print and publish without restriction, and the right of crowd-formation and organisation. The first of these rights is generally called the right of free speech, but that is a misnomer. No crowd tolerates freedom of speech. Imagine the kind of hearing a Tory would receive from a confessedly Liberal audience if he were openly to speak his mind. Nor is the crowd less intolerant of free speech in the ordinary circumstances of life. Who would be wise to utter unpatriotic sentiments in a full railway compartment during the present time of war? Where the crowd is ruling, a man may not openly say the thing he pleases if it be in opposition to public opinion. It is proof of crowd-rule if a man of ordinary prudence finds it inadvisable openly to oppose public prejudice. Nations close the mouths of individuals in the name of patriotism. Society closes them in the name of good form. Churches close them in the name of 177 The Crowd in Peace and War orthodoxy. No! what the public means by freedom of speech is certainly not freedom for each individual to express his own personal opinion. So-called freedom of speech is no part of personal freedom; it is only a factor in crowd-liberty. Freedom of speech, freedom of public meeting, a free press: all these things are parts of liberty. They imply the liberty of the crowd from the control of independent individuals or from limitation of power by constitutional restrictions. It is by public meetings, public speaking, and the press that crowds are formed, developed, and organised. Where these are prevented or regulated crowd- formation is difficult. Where these are controlled and directed by a central authority, a definite direction may be imposed on public opinion, which under free institu- tions might have adopted a contrary attitude. The German Government, by controlling and directing almost all organs of publicity, succeeded in creating a national opinion of singular force and unanimity in sympathy with the wishes and aims of the government itself. In order to form and build up an opposition to the powers that be, liberty of propaganda is almost essential. It can only be dispensed with when a vast number of individuals are so eager to work against a government as to be able to create a national movement by multitudinous personal activity. Such a movement was thus created in Italy against the Austrian government before the day of Italian unity. Under normal political conditions freedom of public utterance is essential for the formation of a new public opinion, that is to say of a new pohtical crowd. 178 Liberty and Freedom The impulse being thus given, hberty to organise the new body is a further necessity. Existing parties view with disfavour the formation of new parties. No one can be sure to what a new party may not grow. The right to organise has therefore been a right that has had to be fought for. Witness the great and bitter struggles by which liberty of religious organisation was won. How the Roman Church resisted the formation of Protestant bodies, and how those in different countries endeavoured to stifle non-conforming bodies! Such resistances to the formation of new crowds result from the normal crowd- instinct of self-preservation, for only by a new crowd can an existing crowd be rivalled, supplanted, or destroyed. Hence the demand on the part of all who would form crowds for liberty to do so if they can. This liberty of theirs does not sufiice them unless it includes a power to control and dragoon the individual member. We have all beheld the organised body of Labour fight for and obtain this liberty, this right to en- slave the individual workman by miscalled peaceful persuasion! It is the open and avowed object of the trades-unions to compel all workmen to come within their body and to exercise over every individual member a complete despotism, not in order to further his particular interest but only that of the collective body. The facts in this case are so obvious that it would be waste of space to illustrate them by many examples; one wiU suflBce. It is obviously the interest of the better and more intelligent workman to be paid more highly in proportion to his superior skill and ability. The employer is pre- vented from thus differentiating. It is to the interest of 179 The Crowd in Peace and War a quick worker to be able to earn more in a day than a slow one. Trades-unions set their faces against his doing so. If one man can manage several machines, it is to his interest to do so, and be paid accordingly. He is forbidden to manage more than one, so that employment may be provided for a larger number. In these and countless other ways an organised and despotic crowd sets the interests or fancied interests of the many before those of the individual, and it is always the superior individual whom the crowd sacrifices, and always the inferior whom it fosters. For to all crowds aU its units are alike. If some are not to drink, all must not drink. If some want holidays, all must take hohdays. If some are to be slow workers, all must be slow workers. All must be depressed to the level which all can reach, inevi- tably a low level. Liberty so to organise crowds is what the crowd calls Liberty. It is the very reverse of Freedom. The men who call aloud for this liberty and are never tired of praising it are the crowd-representatives. They are the people on whom restraint falls, where liberty of associa- tion is limited, and they, instinct with all the passions, prejudices, ambitions, and limitations of the crowd they incorporate, resent, as all crowds and crowd-men must, any interference with their action as corporate exponents. Obviously, then, if individual freedom is to be preserved crowd-liberty must be limited. Just as in national govern- ments unhmited Crowddom is as wretched a state as unlimited monarchy, so in the smaller crowds that exist within a nation a similar limitation of power is essential if freedom is to be maintained. Here therefore once 180 Liberty and Freedom more we are driven to the conclusion that for a healthy community neither complete individual freedom nor com- plete crowd-liberty should be allowed. It is as useless as it is foolish at this time of the world's history to rage against the organisation of crowds and attempt to prevent their easy formation. It is their power of organisation and control over the units that compose them which needs to be limited, that thereby individual initiative, individual thought, individual self-realisation be not impeded. In a sound society the preservation of individual freedom is as important as the preservation of public liberty, and these being hostile the one to the other, it is a main func- tion of the central authority to preserve an equilibrium between them in every rank, occupation, and class. ISl CHAPTER XII EDUCATION REFERENCE has been made above to the educa- tional value of their own pubUc opinion upon the scholars in a school, but the matter is too impor- tant to be thus lightly passed over, whilst the relation of the crowd to education has many other aspects and produces various important results. It might be sup- posed that, if the individual's interests in any area of life are to be provided for, apart from consideration of the interests of the crowd, it should be in respect of edu- cation; for here surely is not the sphere for block treat- ment. The gifts of each child are different from those of the rest. Each has his own possibilities, his own diflSculties, and for each some special future is more to be chosen and prepared for than any other. Moreover, a given child cannot be equally well taught by any of the class labelled "teachers." Some can learn from one, some from another; and the best ultimate output is ar- rived at by the combination of mutually adapted pupil and teacher. Of course, where education is a matter of government ordering, and a universal routine is applied to all alike, the ideal of individual treatment for the pur- pose of attaining the best individual development is not even aimed at. Under no circumstances could that ideal be fully realised, but a system that does not and cannot 182 Education even contemplate it as to be aimed at, must be false in the very nature of things. Our modern public educational system does, however, make one exception in the uniformity of its treatment. That exception is not, as an observer from another planet might have supposed it could be, to devote special atten- tion to the more gifted children so as to make the most of unusual abiUties. It is on the contrary an exceptional treatment for the half-witted, upon whom is lavished a care and attention which they of all children least deserve and can least profit by. Here we trace the dominance of the sentimentality of the crowd, not of the wisdom of the wise. For the crowd, which would regard all units as ahke, resents the intellectual inequalities which nature decrees at birth, fearing in each superior individual a restive crowd-unit, but it has no corresponding dread of the half-witted and can satisfy its sentimentality by according them exceptional advantages without danger to itself. The crowd, looking to its own continued existence throughout a far longer period than the span of human life, regards education as the process whereby the new gen- eration is to be made in its own likeness and to continue its own immediate aspirations. The Church desires to fashion the young into future Churchmen, the Noncon- formists into future Nonconformists, Socialists into Socialists, squires into squires, liberals into liberals, tories into tories, and the whole nation acclaims the wisdom of bending aU efPorts to fashion each and all into what are called "good citizens." Hence the struggle on the part of various crowds to retain the right of polarising the 183 The Crowd in Peace and War education of those children on whom they can respectively lay hands. The parson wants to have them taught the catechism and so forth, the Roman churchman to see that they are well grounded in Catholic dogma, the Non- conformist that they are not taught these things but another set, the Socialists would have their young hps early framed to sing, "There is no god." All alike are earnest in their effort, because they believe with pathetic unanimity that if you train up a child in the way you wish him to go he will remain in that way after your com- pulsion is removed, and this though experience shows the exact contrary to be often the case. Thus the intro- duction of undenominational school-board education was presently followed by a remarkable revival in the vitahty of the Church of England, as the generation thus edu- cated grew up. So long as this superstition exists, so long will various crowds clamour for liberty to preside over the education of their children — a liberty, Uke that other we have just been considering, not for the person educated or his parents to choose what he shall be taught, but for the educator to impose on him a determined and perhaps hated teaching. In these matters it is not by the teacher but by the pubhc opinion of the taught that an individual child is influenced, and no amount of mere instruction will in any way alter or negative the power of that opinion. It is only a gifted teacher who can rise above the ordi- nary level of instruction and compulsion, and can create a desired new public opinion among his charges, that can really affect their character and stamp a lasting impress upon it. 184 Education A remarkable instance of what can thus be accompHshed is given in the Blue Book entitled "Annual Report for 1913 "of the chief medical officer of the Board of Education," (p. 237), wherein is related how the children of the Hughes Fields Girls' Council School at Greenwich were taught the rudiments of cleanliness and decent living. "This " school is situated in an extremely poor part of Deptford. "Indeed, the condition of the children attending the "school was at one time so trying to those who came in "contact with them, that the staff were constantly absent "through illness, it became impossible to keep supply "teachers more than a few days, and the attendance was "frequently as low as 60-70 per cent for the whole year." Accordingly, nine years ago a new regime was introduced, consisting of lessons in hygiene, inspections, and doing things. The lessons may be imagined. They were only given to the older children. The inspections were daily; boots, clothes, hair, hands, nails, handkerchiefs, the basins and towels with which they had washed, all were looked at, and the dirty and untidy were shamed by being put right in the presence of the class. This was the real educational force. A new pubUc opinion was created, and it was fostered by such exercises as tooth-brush drill, nail-trimming drill, and so forth. The children were also asked at what hour they went to bed the previous night, and whether they had slept with an open window. The master of another large school invokes the aid of pubUc opinion in the same direction by having a pre- pared blackboard in each class room with spaces for the insertion of figures detailing the number present with clean boots, collars, nails, teeth, handkerchiefs, and 185 The Crowd in Peace and War "open windows last night." The result of this effort after nine years on the Deptford school is thus described. "The attendance now averages over 92 per cent, the 'members of the staff are no longer frequently absent 'on sick leave, or desirous of obtaining new posts; the 'children now bear the closest inspection, and are able 'to progress normally in the ordinary subjects. Taking 'the school as a whole, the effect of these methods can be 'best seen by passing from the lowest class to the 'highest, thus starting with dirty teeth, bitten nails, un- ' kempt hair, and untidy clothes, we reach clean teeth, 'properly tended hands and hair, and neatly mended 'clothes. The happy air and healthy looks of the chil- ' dren make it hard to beUeve that this is actually a school 'of 'peculiar difficulty.' The children obviously love 'the school, and from being a place avoided by teachers 'it has become a field of happy and useful work." Such are the results brought about by a healthy public opinion. 'In many schools the children who systematically attend 'school with clean boots, clean collars, hair tidily done, 'teeth brushed, and who sleep with their windows open, 'are named 'specials,' and there is a great rivalry amongst 'them to be so classed." Hardly could one cite a better illustration of Ruskin's contention that "Education does not mean teaching "people to know what they do not know — it means "teaching them to behave as they do not behave." If that were all that education means it would be entirely a matter for crowd-influence and not for instruction in the ordinary meaning of the word. A child, who passes through such a school as this, is likely to receive a per- 186 Education manent Impression from it, to have its image in some degree stamped on his own individual character, to have his opinions in some degree fixed by it for life. As Dr. Johnson said, "Opinions once received are seldom "recalled to examination; having been once supposed to "be right they are never discovered to be erroneous." This is as true of false opinions as of soxmd ones. The case above cited is an example of the proper use of crowd-emotion for the improvement of the individual. Seeing that crowds are the home of emotions, it follows that from them, by infection and influence, by the ab- sorption of their atmosphere, the emotions of the individual are mainly to be aroused or even created. If you could bring an individual into contact with successive crowds, all animated by noble ideals of different kinds, the chances are that he would catch those ideals one after another and himself become impregnated by them, just as from an evUly minded public he would with difficulty avoid catching low and base ideals. The use of crowdship in education, therefore, is obvious; it is to ennoble the unit. Instruction cannot do this; instruction tends to defeat its own object if it deserts its proper domain of transfer- ring facts and developing skill. The whole power of edu- cation in respect of character lies in the school's public opinion, and he who can influence the growth in that of high ideals and just principles, he is the moral educator of the young, and no other can take his place. It is, as I have said above, because our English Public Schools and Universities have developed this kind of moral force, that they have been so efficient in the formation of our national character. They may not be the best agencies 187 The Crowd in Peace and War in the world for teaching facts; German schools claim to turn out better equipped intelligences per hour of teach- ing; but as agencies for the formation of character the English Public School and the old universities may claim pre-eminence in the world. The national crowd, then, if wisely directed, will demand of a national system of education, whose main business is to produce good citizens, that chief attention be given, not to what is taught, but to what is caught, not to the amount learnt by a child but to the tone acquired. All of us learn the facts and acquire the skill we need for life mainly from life itself. Teachers can impose on us but a slender equipment. Most of us learn by study not by teaching, or only by teaching as a result of study. He that desires to learn can be easily taught if you give him the opportunity. But to establish that desire in an individual — that is the difficulty, for it cannot be estab- lished by inculcation but only by infection. In countries where the mass of the people have an emotional belief,. a crowd-faith in education, there alone does this desire commonly arise in the young. In Scotland, in Germany, — I know not where else, — there exists an emotional faith in education, and the young work hard and willingly. In England such faith does not exist, and young workers accordingly find the life of a "smug" far from easy. He that can teach the nation a new faith in work will accom- plish for England the great revolution of which it stands in need; but if our schools were caused to lose their present high moral tone in exchange for a more efficient system of instruction, and if our public school boys were to forsake the ideals of good form they now so keenly 188 Education maintain and take up instead a cold ambition for intel- lectual success, the change would be disastrous and Eng- land would presently lose her high place amongst the nations. "I will do it," promises the South American. "On the word of an Englishman?" inquires his friend. "Yes! on the word of an Englishman." That is the finest tribute to our country that the world affords. The public opinion of our public schools is the medium in which that honest English spirit is most efficiently cultivated. Curiously enough, their very efficiency as character-form- ing bodies is the reason why our ancient and incomparable Universities of Oxford and Cambridge are of relatively little use to foreign students, not even to our kindred American students. In the past they have gone chiefly to German universities, the reason being that they were seeking to acquire knowledge and skill, which could there be acquired, in some branches of learning at any rate, more readily than here. After all, the main business of Oxford and Cambridge has been to turn out straight-deal- ing, clean-living Englishmen, and only in a secondary degree to manufacture scholars. They have served our national purpose superlatively well. It is not impossible that they might equally well turn out citizens of the world. That, however, is a matter for the world to discover, not for us to aim at. Moreover the spirit of our Universities was not produced by taking thought; it was evolved in long process of time. If evfer a world-university is to arise, impregnated with a high international or super-national human tone, that also will have to grow, and who shall say where it is likely to take root? If, as Macaulay said, the first business of a state is the 189 The Crowd in Peace and War education of its citizens, the very word employed indi- cates that the matter to be attended to is the development in them of the character of citizenship. By one of those strange contrarieties of which modern systems of govern- ment and legislation afford so many examples, it is ex- actly this side of the educational problem to which the legislature in its large lack of wisdom appears to give no thought. What subjects pupils shall be taught, what hours they shall attend, till what age they shall be kept at school, such are the matters in relation to the young that an Education Office is called to determine. These are all questions that should be determined by individual teachers, by parents, or perhaps small local divisions, and they should of necessity vary widely from time to time and from place to place. The one universal need, the same everywhere, is the formation of character, and that is supposed to be attained by what is called Religious Education. From the point of view of the nation the promotion of a high moral tone among the scholars in every primary school is the first object to be aimed at. If Religious Education is the chosen means to this end it must be something altogether different from mere instruction, and it must not be left to chance, or divided among a lot of conflicting sects, or confined to a definite set of hours, or least of all abandoned altogether. The Labour Party are in favour of having no religious education at all, such is their misunderstanding of their own socialistic princi- ples. If Socialism is to be a reality, it must be based on the moral education of every member of the community, for until all our hearts are changed, the socialistic ideal 190 Education is impossible of attainment. The socialist Sunday schools accomplish nothing by making their children sing "There "is no god," beyond the probability that in after life those very individuals, reacting against a teaching imposed on them, will be more Uable than others to become highly superstitious and credulous. Not socialists only or mainly, but all persons, who have the future welfare of their country at heart, are called upon to devise some universal method for stimulating throughout all the primary schools the same kind of fine ideal of conduct which has made our public schools and old universities so great a blessing to Great Britain. As for the teaching of facts and the development of skill in the individual pupil, that must always be and remain an individual's business. No general laws can govern it, no central administrative body can help it, no code can define it. It must be as variable as are the individual teachers and the individuals taught. Each pupil is a separate problem. Each teacher must solve each such problem for himself in his own way. There is no other possibUity; all that the interference of a central authority can accomplish, if it insists on meddling in these matters, is to impede where it fussily proposes to direct and help. One powerful impetus and one only can the national crowd give to education, in the sense of learning facts and acquiring skill: it is to supply the infective passion for learning. But it can only supply a passion which itself experiences. For no crowd can generate a new emotion from the depths of its own multiplicity; a new emotion must be kindled within it, as of old, by a prophet. What 191 The Crowd in Peace and War England needs is a prophet of learning, and surely now is the time for him to appear: now when the great object lesson of German efficiency looms so large within the vision of us all. The same great light which manifests the inestimable value to us of fine national character, fashioned within our people by the successive ideals laboured for and proclaimed by the generations that have gone before, manifests also a lack among us of per- sonal efficiency in those things which have to be learned by study; so that, while we may indeed thank our fore- fathers that they have not imposed upon us the over- burdening weight of a vile ideal of mere brute force, we ought hkewise to perceive that ours is now the duty to make good what is lacking, and to determine that in the future we will labour to implant in our nation a new faith, a new aspiration toward a larger learning, a fuller intel- lectual life, and a wider diffusion of every sort of skill. "There is nothing in any state so terrible," said Sir Walter Raleigh, "as a powerful and authorised ignorance." Let us see to it that at long last ignorance shall be nationally realised to be among the greatest of national perils. 192 CHAPTER XIII MORALS ROBINSON CRUSOE, when alone on his island, was relieved from aU the problems that arise among members of a commimity. He could harm no fellow-man by any action, but he could still harm himself and behave brutally to the animal world about him. I once saw a Dago sailor plucking a httle live bird to pieces, limb from Umb. The hideousness of that aqt did not depend on the social relations of the evil-doer. It was a sin against his own humanity. It was vile be- cause he was a man, a being highly enough developed to be able to enter into relations with the exterior world of nature and animals on a higher plane than that of mere destructive brutahty. A hawk tears a dicky-bird to pieces without becoming thereby an immoral hawk, or descending in the hawkly scale, but the man who so acts descends in the human scale and thus injures himself and is immoral. There is therefore a morahty which applies solely to the individual as a separate unit, as it were in a crowd- vacuum. I will not pause to inquire whether that mo- rahty could have been developed in such a vacuum, because for our present purpose it is sufficient to indicate the existence of individual morality in a man's relations to himself and to nature. Clearly Robinson Crusoe could 193 The Crowd in Peace and War have overeaten himself, or he could have brewed intoxi- cants and become a drunkard, or he could have indulged in other private vices, and all of them might have been called immoral because all were acts by which he injured himself. Similarly by idleness he might have lowered his vitality, by sloth he might have dulled his powers of ob- servation and action. In these and many other ways he might have sinned against himself. Any action harm- ful to the health either of his body or his mind would have been rightly describable as an immoral action, and if he realised it to be so there would have risen within him an impulse not to do that action. This impulse, this prick of conscience, would have resulted from the mere instinct of self-preservation which every healthy-minded individ- ual possesses, and which operates apart from any relation to his social surroundings. It is an instinct completely individualistic alike in origin and in its purpose. I shall apply the term Individual Morality to a man's obedience to such laws as his instinct for self-preservation and impulse toward self-development unite to impose upon him. Individual morality heeds the adjustment of the individual to the external world of nature. Its laws are primarily those of hygiene, physical and spiritual. Science determines them, so far as the individual has knowledge; will enforces them. Individual morality, enforced by the will and stimulated by individual conscience, does not carry us very far. More important are a man's relations to the persons with whom he comes in contact, his conduct toward each of them and theirs toward him. We may apply the term Mutual Morality to the principles ensuing from the con- 194 Morals duct of such mutual relations between individuals as those of husband and wife, those of parents and children, brothers and sisters, those of friends, and of men in busi- ness relations to one another — master and servant, buyer and seller, landlord and tenant, and so forth. All these are individual relations over which the crowd only by usurpation obtains any control, unless individuals voluntarily call for its sanctions or interference. Thus individuals may invoke the crowd to take cognisance of an agreement, and the crowd may permit its representa- tives to do so and may define the terms on which they may do so. Two men may make a verbal bargain and trust one another's honour, or they may make a legal bargain which crowd-representatives will enforce. That is the individual's option. The admission of the crowd as party to a bargain between individuals is, however, a great danger, because the crowd is certain sooner or later to impose on them consideration for its own supposed interests, under which before long theirs may be over- whelmed. Marriage is an obvious case in point which we shall presently consider. I have used above the word honour, for brevity, as indicating the kind of power by which individuals may be governed in their mutual relations; but that already assumes the existence of crowd-morals enforced by public opinion. Honour is what the crowd of his own kind ren- ders to a man who, in his relations with other individuals, acts up to their standard. This is not mutual moraUty but a kind of crowd-morality, though applied to individ- uals, and it is a dangerous force. Honour even to-day in some countries drives men to kill one another in private 195 The Crowd in Peace and War combat, and it might be shown to be far from a perfect guide of conduct under all circumstances. No! the guide to a perfect mutual morality is the whole group of Chris- tian virtues, and greatest amongst them is Charity. Love is the fulfilling of all the law of mutual conduct, and he that sins against his fellow-man sins always against love. Love is the sufficient stimulus that forms and quickens the mutual conscience. It operates only between indi- viduals. It has no relation to the crowd. The crowd, indeed, conscious of the power of love, attempts to con- fuse the individual mind and to impose on it the duty of collective loving; but this is mere crowd-speech, the flower of rhetoric, nothing more. If anyone doubts it let him attend some big public meeting and gaze at the audience from the platform. Then let him, retaining if he can a perfectly detached attitude towards the en- thusiasms of the multitude, ask himself does he, can he, actually and truly love that seething assemblage, love it with an emotion wholly the same as the emotion he feels towards a human friend? Of course he cannot. He may generate towards it within himseK a share of the crowd's enthusiasm. That is not love. Only by confusing his own mind with crowd-passions and mistaking his share of them for individual emotion can. he deceive himself into the belief that he loves mankind. He may be pos- sessed by an enthusiasm of humanity, but he can only love individual men, not mankind. The human crowd, however, exists and must always exist. Each one of us must belong to many crowds and our lives and feelings must be to a greater or less extent conditioned by them. Hence individuals in a gregarious 196 Morals world are necessarily involved in a third and more compli- cated morality, which we may designate as social. Social Morality is independent alike of individual and of mutual morality, which remain the same whether the individual be living as a Crusoe, as one of a family, or as the unit of a crowd. His own well-being of body and mind and that of those personally associated with him are as much matter for pursuit by him under the one condition as under the other, so long as what is good for him does not prove to be bad for the crowd. When that happens a conflict is set up and interesting problems arise for solution. Social morality bears to crowds the same relation that individual morality bears to individuals, but with this practical difference, that, whereas the unit imposes his own individual morals upon himself, the crowd im- poses social morals upon the unit, and in so doing regards not his weU-being but its own. The crowd being, as by hypothesis we are regarding it, a kind of beast, not hu- man, but bmlt up of human units, as living tissue is built up of cells, and the crowd having a life of its own, in some ways superior, in others inferior, to the life of its com- ponent individuals, possesses a corresponding number of interests of its own, altogether different from and inde- pendent of the interests of those individuals. These are the interests involved in the preservation, growth, higher development, and healthy persistence of the said social organism or particular crowd for the time being under consideration, whether it be national, municipal, religious, or of any other sort. The national crowd or great public is the important morality-making power, to which all minor crowds are, 197 The Crowd in Peace and War in this matter, of insignificant importance. The well- being of the nation as a whole is the sole interest of the national crowd. To it all individuals are aUke. All are mere imits, one as good as another. The individual's powers, interests, preferences, capacities, accomplishments, do not come within its ken, unless they are employed representatively in its service. It cares no more for the life of one of them than for that of another, except in the case of a crowd-representative. Leaving crowd-repre- sentatives out of account, all other men are to it of equal value and all alike are to be subordinated to its interests and if need be, sacrificed to those interests. The crowd accordingly, by every means in its power, strives to impose this subserviency upon the individual. It stigmatises as crimes those actions which are obviously injurious to the social organism and which can be defined and are capable of proof. Against these formal laws are enacted and enforced by representative executive au- thority. It stigmatises as vices actions injurious to the individual or those which injure itself in a vague man- ner and cannot be precisely defined, proved, and pre- vented by force. These it attempts to suppress by the power of public reprobation and by the exercise of every kind of restraint that education, tradition, social struc- ture, and any other discoverable agency employable in its service can bring to bear. Further, the crowd that imposes morals is not the mere body of living folk at any given moment in the country or to be numbered in the nation. It includes the generations that have passed. Morals are not the invention of the people of to-day; they have been slowly produced and continuously devel- 193 Morals oped and handed down in the long process of time. A given generation may add to them or give them a slightly new direction, but that is all. They are the product of the cumulative pubhc opinion of many generations, and the purpose of them now and always is and has been to promote the collective health and general well-being of the national crowd. It is evident that it matters nothing to the individual whether he flourishes in health and happiness in conse- quence of his individual morality or in consequence of his accordance with a healthy crowd-morality. Nor would it really matter to a nation whether all its imits were to flourish for the one reason or for the other. If every individual, going his own way and following his own rule of conduct, were to obtain happiness, a coimtry would be filled with happy individuals without any help from a crowd-moraUty. But this the crowd can never be expected to conceive. No public opiaion ever really approves of individual success. A man for instance may keep a private school and turn out from it a succession of fine young fellows impregnated with noble ideals and perfectly fitted for the struggle of life. Such a private venture will never be regarded sympathetically by the crowd, which is driven by its own nature to desire control over all the formative agencies that go to fashion a coming generation. It insists directly or indirectly on having its morality imposed everywhere and on every one, and it desires to take security that so it shall be. It is not, however, the formal and legal imposition of crowd-morality that is most important, but the informal and indirect. This imposition is effected by public 199 The Crowd in Peace and War opinion enforcing upon the minds of all what it calls the laws of right and wrong. Those things are held up to us as right which are beneficial to the crowd; those things as wrong which are injurious to it. Thus recently we came for a time very near to a condition in which a man would have found himself regarded as doing a wrong action if he drank a glass of wine. The body politic, we were told, was sufPering from alcohol, which some of its units were drinking too freely. Those who did so un- doubtedly sinned against individual morality, but, if that were aU, the crowd would have been profoundly indifiFerent. It is only when the crowd as such suffers by the action of individuals that it begins to talk of right and wrong. As soon as it obtains an emotional realisation that a given act is injurious to the collective body it directs public opinion, and presently also by its aid the law, against that act, and knowing as it does no difference of persons, but regarding all as units, it discountenances the act in all and tries to put an end to it imiver sally. Under such circumstances an opposition may readily arise between individual and crowd moraUty. Alcohol may be advantageous to a given individual; it may be helpful to his digestion or even to his mind. No matter! If it hurts the crowd by the misuse of some, he must give up drinking it; or at least every effort the crowd can make shall be employed to drive him to give it up. This con- crete instance is merely one of a countless number that might be cited where the interest of the crowd and the interest of the individual may be at variance and where the crowd endeavours, often with success, to make its conception of its own interest prevail.