A collection of individuals is not always, and by the mere fact of its
collectivity, a society. On the other hand, when people come together
anywhere, in the most casual way, on the street corner or at a railway
station, no matter how great the social distances between them, the mere
fact that they are aware of one another's presence sets up a lively
exchange of influences, and the behavior that ensues is both social and
collective. It is social, at the very least, in the sense that the train
of thought and action in each individual is influenced more or less by
the action of every other. It is collective in so far as each individual
acts under the influence of a mood or a state of mind in which each
shares, and in accordance with conventions which all quite unconsciously
accept, and which the presence of each enforces upon the others.
The amount of individual eccentricity or deviation from normal and
accepted modes of behavior which a community will endure without comment
and without protest will vary naturally enough with the character of the
community. A cosmopolitan community like New York City can and does
endure a great deal in the way of individual eccentricity that a smaller
city like Boston would not tolerate. In any case, and this is the point
of these observations, even in the most casual relations of life, people
do not behave in the presence of others as if they were living alone
like Robinson Crusoe, each on his individual island. The very fact of
their consciousness of each other tends to maintain and enforce a great
body of convention and usage which otherwise falls into abeyance and is
forgotten. Collective behavior, then, is the behavior of individuals
under the influence of an impulse that is common and collective, an
impulse, in other words, that is the result of social interaction.
The most elementary form of collective behavior seems to be what is
ordinarily referred to as "social unrest." Unrest in the individual
becomes social when it is, or seems to be, transmitted from one
individual to another, but more particularly when it produces something
akin to the milling process in the herd, so that the manifestations of
discontent in A communicated to B, and from B reflected back to A,
produce the circular reaction described in the preceding chapter.
The significance of social unrest is that it represents at once a
breaking up of the established routine and a preparation for new
collective action. Social unrest is not of course a new phenomenon; it
is possibly true, however, that it is peculiarly characteristic, as has
been said, of modern life. The contrast between the conditions of modern
life and of primitive society suggests why this may be true.
The conception which we ought to form of primitive society, says Sumner,
is that of small groups scattered over a territory. The size of the
group will be determined by the conditions of the struggle for existence
and the internal organization of each group will correspond (1) to the
size of the group, and (2) to the nature and intensity of the struggle
with its neighbors.
Thus war and peace have reacted on each other and developed
each other, one within the group, the other in the intergroup
relation. The closer the neighbors, and the stronger they are,
the intenser is the warfare, and then the intenser is the
internal organization and discipline of each. Sentiments are
produced to correspond. Loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it,
hatred and contempt for outsiders, brotherhood within,
warlikeness without—all grow together, common products of the
same situation. These relations and sentiments constitute a
social philosophy. It is sanctified by connection with
religion. Men of an others-group are outsiders with whose
ancestors the ancestors of the we-group waged war. The ghosts
of the latter will see with pleasure their descendants keep up
the fight, and will help them. Virtue consists in killing,
plundering, and enslaving outsiders.[280]
The isolation, territorial and cultural, under which alone it is
possible to maintain an organization which corresponds to Sumner's
description, has disappeared within comparatively recent times from all
the more inhabitable portions of the earth. In place of it there has
come, and with increasing rapidity is coming, into existence a society
which includes within its limits the total population of the earth and
is so intimately bound together that the speculation of a grain merchant
in Chicago may increase the price of bread in Bombay, while the act of
an assassin in a provincial town in the Balkans has been sufficient to
plunge the world into a war which changed the political map of three
continents and cost the lives, in Europe alone, of 8,500,000 combatants.
The first effect of modern conditions of life has been to increase and
vastly complicate the economic interdependence of strange and distant
peoples, i.e., to destroy distances and make the world, as far as
national relations are concerned, small and tight.
The second effect has been to break down family, local, and national
ties, and emancipate the individual man.
When the family ceases, as it does in the city, to be an
economic unit, when parents and children have vocations that
not only intercept the traditional relations of family life,
but make them well nigh impossible, the family ceases to
function as an organ of social control. When the different
nationalities, with their different national cultures, have so
far interpenetrated one another that each has permanent
colonies within the territorial limits of the other, it is
inevitable that the old solidarities, the common loyalties and
the common hatreds that formerly bound men together in
primitive kinship and local groups should be undermined.
A survey of the world today shows that vast changes are everywhere in
progress. Not only in Europe but in Asia and in Africa new cultural
contacts have undermined and broken down the old cultures. The effect
has been to loosen all the social bonds and reduce society to its
individual atoms. The energies thus freed have produced a world-wide
ferment. Individuals released from old associations enter all the more
readily into new ones. Out of this confusion new and strange political
and religious movements arise, which represent the groping of men for a
new social order.
Gustave Le Bon, who was the first writer to call attention to the
significance of the crowd as a social phenomenon,[281] said that mass
movements mark the end of an old régime and the beginning of a new.
"When the structure of a civilization is rotten, it is always the masses
that bring about its downfall."[282] On the other hand, "all founders of
religious or political creeds have established them solely because they
were successful in inspiring crowds with those fanatical sentiments
which have as result that men find their happiness in worship and
obedience and are ready to lay down their lives for their idol."[283]
The crowd was, for Le Bon, not merely any group brought together by the
accident of some chance excitement, but it was above all the emancipated
masses whose bonds of loyalty to the old order had been broken by "the
destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which
all the elements of our civilization are rooted." The crowd, in other
words, typified for Le Bon the existing social order. Ours is an age of
crowds, he said, an age in which men, massed and herded together in
great cities without real convictions or fundamental faiths, are likely
to be stampeded in any direction for any chance purpose under the
influence of any passing excitement.
Le Bon did not attempt to distinguish between the crowd and the public.
This distinction was first made by Tarde in a paper entitled "Le Public
et la foule," published first in La Revue de Paris in 1898, and
included with several others on the same general theme under the title
L'Opinion et la foule which appeared in 1901. The public, according to
Tarde, was a product of the printing press. The limits of the crowd are
determined by the length to which a voice will carry or the distance
that the eye can survey. But the public presupposes a higher stage of
social development in which suggestions are transmitted in the form of
ideas and there is "contagion without contact."[284]
The fundamental distinction between the crowd and the public, however,
is not to be measured by numbers nor by means of communication, but by
the form and effects of the interactions. In the public, interaction
takes the form of discussion. Individuals tend to act upon one another
critically; issues are raised and parties form. Opinions clash and thus
modify and moderate one another.
The crowd does not discuss and hence it does not reflect. It simply
"mills." Out of this milling process a collective impulse is formed
which dominates all members of the crowd. Crowds, when they act, do so
impulsively. The crowd, says Le Bon, "is the slave of its impulses."
"The varying impulses which crowds obey may be, according to their
exciting causes, generous or cruel, heroic or cowardly, but they will
always be so imperious that the interest of the individual, even the
interest of self-preservation, will not dominate them."[285]
When the crowd acts it becomes a mob. What happens when two mobs meet?
We have in the literature no definite record. The nearest approach to it
are the occasional accounts we find in the stories of travelers of the
contacts and conflicts of armies of primitive peoples. These
undisciplined hordes are, as compared with the armies of civilized
peoples, little more than armed mobs. Captain S. L. Hinde in his story
of the Belgian conquest of the Congo describes several such battles.
From the descriptions of battles carried on almost wholly between savage
and undisciplined troops it is evident that the morale of an army of
savages is a precarious thing. A very large part of the warfare consists
in alarms and excursions interspersed with wordy duels to keep up the
courage on one side and cause a corresponding depression on the
other.[286]
Gangs are conflict groups. Their organization is usually quite informal
and is determined by the nature and imminence of its conflicts with
other groups. When one crowd encounters another it either goes to pieces
or it changes its character and becomes a conflict group. When
negotiations and palavers take place as they eventually do between
conflict groups, these two groups, together with the neutrals who have
participated vicariously in the conflict, constitute a public. It is
possible that the two opposing savage hordes which seek, by threats and
boastings and beatings of drums, to play upon each other's fears and so
destroy each other's morale, may be said to constitute a very primitive
type of public.
Discussion, as might be expected, takes curious and interesting forms
among primitive peoples. In a volume, Iz Derevni: 12 Pisem ("From the
Country: 12 Letters"), A. N. Engelgardt describes the way in which the
Slavic peasants reach their decisions in the village council.
In the discussion of some questions by the mir [organization
of neighbors] there are no speeches, no debates, no votes. They
shout, they abuse one another—they seem on the point of coming
to blows; apparently they riot in the most senseless manner.
Some one preserves silence, and then suddenly puts in a word,
one word, or an ejaculation, and by this word, this
ejaculation, he turns the whole thing upside down. In the end,
you look into it and find that an admirable decision has been
formed and, what is most important, a unanimous decision....
(In the division of land) the cries, the noise, the hubbub do
not subside until everyone is satisfied and no doubter is
left.[287]
Reference has been made to the crowds that act, but crowds do not always
act. Sometimes they merely dance or, at least, make expressive motions
which relieve their feelings. "The purest and most typical expression of
simple feeling," as Hirn remarks, "is that which consists of mere random
movements."[288] When these motions assume, as they so easily do, the
character of a fixed sequence in time, that is to say when they are
rhythmical, they can be and inevitably are, as by a sort of inner
compulsion, imitated by the onlookers. "As soon as the expression is
fixed in rhythmical form its contagious power is incalculably
increased."[289]
This explains at once the function and social importance of the dance
among primitive people. It is the form in which they prepare for battle
and celebrate their victories. It gives the form at once to their
religious ritual and to their art. Under the influence of the memories
and the emotions which these dances stimulate the primitive group
achieves a sense of corporate unity, which makes corporate action
possible outside of the fixed and sacred routine of ordinary daily life.
If it is true, as has been suggested, that art and religion had their
origin in the choral dance, it is also true that in modern times
religious sects and social movements have had their origin in crowd
excitements and spontaneous mass movements. The very names which have
been commonly applied to them—Quakers, Shakers, Convulsionaires, Holy
Rollers—suggest not merely the derision with which they were at one
time regarded, but indicate likewise their origin in ecstatic or
expressive crowds, the crowds that do not act.
All great mass movements tend to display, to a greater or less extent,
the characteristics that Le Bon attributes to crowds. Speaking of the
convictions of crowds, Le Bon says:
When these convictions are closely examined, whether at epochs
marked by fervent religious faith, or by great political
upheavals such as those of the last century, it is apparent
that they always assume a peculiar form which I cannot better
define than by giving it the name of a religious
sentiment.[290]
Le Bon's definition of religion and religious sentiment will hardly find
general acceptance but it indicates at any rate his conception of the
extent to which individual personalities are involved in the excitements
that accompany mass movements.
A person is not religious solely when he worships a divinity,
but when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete
submission of his will, and the whole-souled ardour of
fanaticism at the service of a cause or an individual who
becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions.[291]
Just as the gang may be regarded as the perpetuation and permanent form
of "the crowd that acts," so the sect, religious or political, may be
regarded as a perpetuation and permanent form of the orgiastic
(ecstatic) or expressive crowd.
"The sect," says Sighele, "is a crowd triée, selected, and permanent,
the crowd is a transient sect, which does not select its members. The
sect is the chronic form of the crowd; the crowd is the acute form
of the sect."[292] It is Sighele's conception that the crowd is an
elementary organism, from which the sect issues, like the chick from the
egg, and that all other types of social groups "may, in this same
manner, be deduced from this primitive social protoplasm." This is a
simplification which the facts hardly justify. It is true that, implicit
in the practices and the doctrines of a religious sect, there is the
kernel of a new independent culture.
A sect is a religious organization that is at war with the existing
mores. It seeks to cultivate a state of mind and establish a code of
morals different from that of the world about it and for this it claims
divine authority. In order to accomplish this end it invariably seeks to
set itself off in contrast with the rest of the world. The simplest and
most effective way to achieve this is to adopt a peculiar form of dress
and speech. This, however, invariably makes its members objects of scorn
and derision, and eventually of persecution. It would probably do this
even if there was no assumption of moral superiority to the rest of the
world in this adoption of a peculiar manner and dress.
Persecution tends to dignify and sanctify all the external marks of the
sect, and it becomes a cardinal principle of the sect to maintain them.
Any neglect of them is regarded as disloyalty and is punished as heresy.
Persecution may eventually, as was the case with the Puritans, the
Quakers, the Mormons, compel the sect to seek refuge in some part of the
world where it may practice its way of life in peace.
Once the sect has achieved territorial isolation and territorial
solidarity, so that it is the dominant power within the region that it
occupies, it is able to control the civil organization, establish
schools and a press, and so put the impress of a peculiar culture upon
all the civil and political institutions that it controls. In this case
it tends to assume the form of a state, and become a nationality.
Something approaching this was achieved by the Mormons in Utah. The most
striking illustration of the evolution of a nationality from a sect is
Ulster, which now has a position not quite that of a nation within the
English empire.
This sketch suggests that the sect, like most other social institutions,
originates under conditions that are typical for all institutions of the
same species; then it develops in definite and predictable ways, in
accordance with a form or entelechy that is predetermined by
characteristic internal processes and mechanisms, and that has, in
short, a nature and natural history which can be described and explained
in sociological terms. Sects have their origin in social unrest to which
they give a direction and expression in forms and practices that are
largely determined by historical circumstances; movements which were at
first inchoate impulses and aspirations gradually take form; policies
are defined, doctrine and dogmas formulated; and eventually an
administrative machinery and efficiencies are developed to carry into
effect policies and purposes. The Salvation Army, of which we have a
more adequate history than of most other religious movements, is an
example.
A sect in its final form may be described, then, as a movement of social
reform and regeneration that has become institutionalized. Eventually,
when it has succeeded in accommodating itself to the other rival
organizations, when it has become tolerant and is tolerated, it tends to
assume the form of a denomination. Denominations tend and are perhaps
destined to unite in the form of religious federations—a thing which is
inconceivable of a sect.
What is true of the sect, we may assume, and must assume if social
movements are to become subjects for sociological investigation, is true
of other social institutions. Existing institutions represent social
movements that survived the conflict of cultures and the struggle for
existence.
Sects, and that is what characterizes and distinguishes them from
secular institutions, at least, have had their origin in movements that
aimed to reform the mores—movements that sought to renovate and renew
the inner life of the community. They have wrought upon society from
within outwardly. Revolutionary and reform movements, on the contrary,
have been directed against the outward fabric and formal structure of
society. Revolutionary movements in particular have assumed that if the
existing structure could be destroyed it would then be possible to erect
a new moral order upon the ruins of the old social structures.
A cursory survey of the history of revolutions suggests that the most
radical and the most successful of them have been religious. Of this
type of revolution Christianity is the most conspicuous example.
The materials in this chapter have been arranged under the headings:
(a) social contagion, (b) the crowd, and (c) types of mass
movements. The order of materials follows, in a general way, the order
of institutional evolution. Social unrest is first communicated, then
takes form in crowd and mass movements, and finally crystallizes in
institutions. The history of almost any single social movement—woman's
suffrage, prohibition, protestantism—exhibit in a general way, if not
in detail, this progressive change in character. There is at first a
vague general discontent and distress. Then a violent, confused, and
disorderly, but enthusiastic and popular movement, and finally the
movement takes form; develops leadership, organization; formulates
doctrines and dogmas. Eventually it is accepted, established, legalized.
The movement dies, but the institution remains.
a) Social contagion.—The ease and the rapidity with which a
cultural trait originating in one cultural group finds its way to other
distant groups is familiar to students of folklore and ethnology. The
manner in which fashions are initiated in some metropolitan community,
and thence make their way, with more or less rapidity, to the provinces
is an illustration of the same phenomenon in a different context.
Fashion plays a much larger rôle in social life than most of us
imagine. Fashion dominates our manners and dress but it
influences also our sentiments and our modes of thought.
Everything in literature, art or philosophy that was
characteristic of the middle of the nineteenth century, the
"mid-Victorian period," is now quite out of date and no one who
is intelligent now-a-days practices the pruderies, defends the
doctrines, nor shares the enthusiasms of that period.
Philosophy, also, changes with the fashion and Sumner says that
even mathematics and science do the same. Lecky in his history
of Rationalism in Europe describes in great detail how the
belief in witches, so characteristic of the Middle Ages,
gradually disappeared with the period of enlightenment and
progress.[293] But the enlightenment of the eighteenth century
was itself a fashion and is now quite out of date. In the
meantime a new popular and scientific interest is growing up in
obscure mental phenomena which no man with scientific training
would have paid any attention to a few years ago because he did
not believe in such things. It was not good form to do so.
But the changes of fashion are so pervasive, so familiar, and, indeed,
universal phenomena that we do not regard the changes which they bring,
no matter how fantastic, as quite out of the usual and expected order.
Gabriel Tarde, however, regards the "social contagion" represented in
fashion (imitation) as the fundamental social phenomenon.[294]
The term social epidemic, which is, like fashion, a form of social
contagion, has a different origin and a different connotation. J. F. C.
Hecker, whose study of the Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages, published
in 1832, was an incident of his investigation of the Black Death, was
perhaps the first to give currency to the term.[295] Both the Black
Death and the Dancing Mania assumed the form of epidemics and the
latter, the Dancing Mania, was in his estimation the sequel of the
former, the Black Death. It was perhaps this similarity in the manner in
which they spread—the one by physical and the other by psychical
infection—that led him to speak of the spread of a popular delusion in
terms of a physical science. Furthermore, the hysteria was directly
traceable, as he believed, to the prevailing conditions of the time, and
this seemed to put the manifestations in the world of intelligible and
controllable phenomena, where they could be investigated.
It is this notion, then, that unrest which manifests itself in social
epidemics is an indication of pathological social conditions, and the
further, the more general, conception that unrest does not become social
and hence contagious except when there are contributing causes in the
environment—it is this that gives its special significance to the term
and the facts. Unrest in the social organism with the social ferments
that it induces is like fever in the individual organism, a highly
important diagnostic symptom.
b) The crowd.—Neither Le Bon nor any of the other writers upon the
subject of mass psychology has succeeded in distinguishing clearly
between the organized or "psychological" crowd, as Le Bon calls it, and
other similar types of social groups. These distinctions, if they are to
be made objectively, must be made on the basis of case studies. It is
the purpose of the materials under the general heading of "The 'Animal'
Crowd," not so much to furnish a definition, as to indicate the nature
and sources of materials from which a definition can be formulated. It
is apparent that the different animal groups behave in ways that are
distinctive and characteristic, ways which are predetermined in the
organism to an extent that is not true of human beings.
One other distinction may possibly be made between the so-called
"animal" and the human crowd. The organized crowd is controlled by a
common purpose and acts to achieve, no matter how vaguely it is
defined, a common end. The herd, on the other hand, has apparently no
common purpose. Every sheep in the flock, at least as the behavior of
the flock is ordinarily interpreted, behaves like every other. Action in
a stampede, for example, is collective but it is not concerted. It is
very difficult to understand how there can be concerted action in the
herd or the flock unless it is on an instinctive basis. The crowd,
however, responds to collective representations. The crowd does not
imitate or follow its leader as sheep do a bellwether. On the contrary,
the crowd carries out the suggestions of the leader, and even though
there be no division of labor each individual acts more or less in his
own way to achieve a common end.
In the case of a panic or a stampede, however, where there is no common
end, the crowd acts like a flock of sheep. But a stampede or a panic is
not a crowd in Le Bon's sense. It is not a psychological unity, nor a
"single being," subject to "the mental unity of crowds."[296] The panic
is the crowd in dissolution. All effective methods of dispersing crowds
involve some method of distracting attention, breaking up the tension,
and dissolving the mob into its individual units.
c) Types of mass movements.—The most elementary form of mass
movement is a mass migration. Such a mass movement displays, in fact,
many of the characteristics of the "animal" crowd. It is the "human"
herd. The migration of a people, either as individuals or in organized
groups, may be compared to the swarming of the hive. Peoples migrate in
search of better living conditions, or merely in search of new
experience. It is usually the younger generation, the more restless,
active, and adaptable, who go out from the security of the old home to
seek their fortunes in the new. Once settled on the new land, however,
immigrants inevitably remember and idealize the home they have left.
Their first disposition is to reproduce as far as possible in the new
world the institutions and the social order of the old. Just as the
spider spins his web out of his own body, so the immigrant tends to spin
out of his experience and traditions, a social organization which
reproduces, as far as circumstances will permit, the organization and
the life of the ancestral community. In this way the older culture is
transplanted and renews itself, under somewhat altered circumstances, in
the new home. That explains, in part, at any rate, the fact that
migration tends to follow the isotherms, since all the more fundamental
cultural devices and experience are likely to be accommodations to
geographical and climatic conditions.
In contrast with migrations are movements which are sometimes referred
to as crusades, partly because of the religious fervor and fanaticism
with which they are usually conducted and partly because they are an
appeal to the masses of the people for direct action and depend for
their success upon their ability to appeal to some universal human
interest or to common experiences and interests that are keenly
comprehended by the common man.
The Woman's Christian Temperance Crusade, referred to in the materials,
may be regarded, if we are permitted to compare great things with small,
as an illustration of collective behavior not unlike the crusades of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Crusades are reformatory and religious. This was true at any rate of the
early crusades, inspired by Peter the Hermit, whatever may have been the
political purposes of the popes who encouraged them. It was the same
motive that led the people of the Middle Ages to make pilgrimages which
led them to join the crusades. At bottom it was an inner restlessness,
that sought peace in great hardship and inspiring action, which moved
the masses.
Somewhat the same widespread contagious restlessness is the source of
most of our revolutions. It is not, however, hardships and actual
distress that inspire revolutions but hopes and dreams, dreams which
find expression in those myths and "vital lies," as Vernon Lee calls
them,[297] which according to Sorel are the only means of moving the
masses.
The distinction between crusades, like the Woman's Temperance Crusade,
and revolutions, like the French Revolution, is that one is a radical
attempt to correct a recognized evil and the other is a radical attempt
to reform an existing social order.
At a cotton manufactory at Hodden Bridge, in Lancashire, a girl, on the
fifteenth of February, 1787, put a mouse into the bosom of another girl,
who had a great dread of mice. The girl was immediately thrown into a
fit, and continued in it with the most violent convulsions for
twenty-four hours. On the following day three more girls were seized in
the same manner; and on the seventeenth, six more. By this time the
alarm was so great that the whole work, in which 200 or 300 were
employed, was totally stopped, and an idea prevailed that a particular
disease had been introduced by a bag of cotton opened in the house. On
Sunday, the eighteenth, Dr. St. Clare was sent for from Preston; before
he arrived three more were seized, and during that night and the morning
of the nineteenth, eleven more, making in all twenty-four. Of these,
twenty-one were young women, two were girls of about ten years of age,
and one man, who had been much fatigued with holding the girls. Three of
the number lived about two miles from the place where the disorder
first broke out, and three at another factory in Clitheroe, about five
miles distant, which last and two more were infected entirely from
report, not having seen the other patients, but, like them and the rest
of the country, strongly impressed with the idea of the plague being
caught from the cotton. The symptoms were anxiety, strangulation, and
very strong convulsions; and these were so violent as to last without
any intermission from a quarter of an hour to twenty-four hours, and to
require four or five persons to prevent the patients from tearing their
hair and dashing their heads against the floor or walls. Dr. St. Clare
had taken with him a portable electrical machine, and by electric shocks
the patients were universally relieved without exception. As soon as the
patients and the country were assured that the complaint was merely
nervous, easily cured, and not introduced by the cotton, no fresh person
was affected. To dissipate their apprehension still further, the best
effects were obtained by causing them to take a cheerful glass and join
in a dance. On Tuesday, the twentieth, they danced, and the next day
were all at work, except two or three, who were much weakened by their
fits.
So early as the year 1374, assemblages of men and women were seen at
Aix-la-Chapelle who had come out of Germany and who, united by one
common delusion, exhibited to the public both in the streets and in the
churches the following strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in
hand and, appearing to have lost all control over their senses,
continued dancing, regardless of the by-standers, for hours together in
wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of
exhaustion. While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible
to external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions,
their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out; and
some of them afterward asserted that they felt as if they had been
immersed in a stream of blood, which obliged them to leap so high.
Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open and the Saviour
enthroned with the Virgin Mary, according as the religious notions of
the age were strangely and variously reflected in their imaginations.
Where the disease was completely developed, the attack commenced with
epileptic convulsions. Those affected fell to the ground senseless,
panting and laboring for breath. They foamed at the mouth, and suddenly
springing up began their dance amid strange contortions. Yet the malady
doubtless made its appearance very variously, and was modified by
temporary or local circumstances, whereof non-medical contemporaries but
imperfectly noted the essential particulars, accustomed as they were to
confound their observation of natural events with their notions of the
world of spirits.
It was but a few months ere this demoniacal disease had spread from
Aix-la-Chapelle, where it appeared in July, over the neighboring
Netherlands. Wherever the dancers appeared, the people assembled in
crowds to gratify their curiosity with the frightful spectacle. At
length the increasing number of the affected excited no less anxiety
than the attention that was paid to them. In towns and villages they
took possession of the religious houses, processions were everywhere
instituted on their account, and masses were said and hymns were sung,
while the disease itself, of the demoniacal origin of which no one
entertained the least doubt, excited everywhere astonishment and horror.
In Liége the priests had recourse to exorcisms and endeavored by every
means in their power to allay an evil which threatened so much danger to
themselves; for the possessed, assembling in multitudes, frequently
poured forth imprecations against them and menaced their destruction.
A few months after this dancing malady had made its appearance at
Aix-la-Chapelle, it broke out at Cologne, where the number of those
possessed amounted to more than five hundred; and about the same time at
Metz, the streets of which place are said to have been filled with
eleven hundred dancers. Peasants left their plows, mechanics their
workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels,
and this rich commercial city became the scene of the most ruinous
disorder. Secret desires were excited and but too often found
opportunities for wild enjoyment; and numerous beggars, stimulated by
vice and misery, availed themselves of this new complaint to gain a
temporary livelihood. Girls and boys quitted their parents, and
servants their masters, to amuse themselves at the dances of those
possessed, and greedily imbibed the poison of mental infection. Above a
hundred unmarried women were seen raving about in consecrated and
unconsecrated places, and the consequences were soon perceived. Gangs of
idle vagabonds, who understood how to imitate to the life the gestures
and convulsions of those really affected, roved from place to place
seeking maintenance and adventures, and thus, wherever they went,
spreading this disgusting spasmodic disease like a plague; for in
maladies of this kind the susceptible are infected as easily by the
appearance as by the reality. At last it was found necessary to drive
away these mischievous guests, who were equally inaccessible to the
exorcisms of the priests and the remedies of the physicians. It was not,
however, until after four months that the Rhenish cities were able to
suppress these impostures, which had so alarmingly increased the
original evil. In the meantime, when once called into existence, the
plague crept on and found abundant food in the tone of thought which
prevailed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even, though in
a minor degree, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth, causing a
permanent disorder of the mind, and exhibiting, in those cities to whose
inhabitants it was a novelty, scenes as strange as they were detestable.
Understand that a flock is not the same thing as a number of sheep. On
the stark, wild headlands of the White Mountains, as many as thirty
Bighorn are known to run in loose, fluctuating hordes; in fenced
pastures, two to three hundred; close-herded on the range, two to three
thousand; but however artificially augmented, the flock is always a
conscious adjustment. There are always leaders, middlers, and tailers,
each insisting on its own place in the order of going. Should the flock
be rounded up suddenly in alarm it mills within itself until these have
come to their own places.
There is much debate between herders as to the advantage of goats over
sheep as leaders. In any case there are always a few goats in a flock,
and most American owners prefer them; but the Frenchmen choose
bell-wethers. Goats lead naturally by reason of a quicker instinct,
forage more freely, and can find water on their own account. But
wethers, if trained with care, learn what goats abhor, to take broken
ground sedately, to walk through the water rather than set the whole
flock leaping and scrambling; but never to give voice to alarm, as goats
will, and call the herder.
It appears that leaders understand their office, and goats particularly
exhibit a jealousy of their rights to be first over the stepping-stones
or to walk the teetering log-bridges at the roaring creeks. By this
facile reference of the initiative to the wisest one, the shepherd is
served most. The dogs learn to which of the flock to communicate orders,
at which heels a bark or a bite soonest sets the flock in motion. But
the flock-mind obsesses equally the best-trained, flashes as instantly
from the meanest of the flock.
By very little the herder may turn the flock-mind to his advantage, but
chiefly it works against him. Suppose on the open range the impulse to
forward movement overtakes them, set in motion by some eager leaders
that remember enough of what lies ahead to make them oblivious to what
they pass. They press ahead. The flock draws on. The momentum of travel
grows. The bells clang soft and hurriedly; the sheep forget to feed;
they neglect the tender pastures; they will not stay to drink. Under an
unwise or indolent herder the sheep going on an unaccustomed trail will
overtravel and underfeed, until in the midst of good pasture they starve
upon their feet. So it is on the Long Trail you so often see the herder
walking with his dogs ahead of his sheep to hold them back to feed. But
if it should be new ground he must go after and press them skilfully,
for the flock-mind balks chiefly at the unknown.
In sudden attacks from several quarters, or inexplicable man-thwarting
of their instincts, the flock-mind teaches them to turn a solid front,
revolving about in the smallest compass with the lambs in their midst,
narrowing and indrawing until they perish by suffocation. So they did in
the intricate defiles of Red Rock, where Carrier lost 250 in '74, and at
Poison Springs, as Narcisse Duplin told me, where he had to choose
between leaving them to the deadly waters, or, prevented from the
spring, made witless by thirst, to mill about until they piled up and
killed threescore in their midst. By no urgency of the dogs could they
be moved forward or scattered until night fell with coolness and
returning sanity. Nor does the imperfect gregariousness of man always
save us from ill-considered rushes or strangulous in-turnings of the
social mass. Notwithstanding there are those who would have us to be
flock-minded.
It is doubtful if the herder is anything more to the flock than an
incident of the range, except as a giver of salt, for the only cry they
make to him is the salt cry. When the natural craving is at the point of
urgency, they circle about his camp or his cabin, leaving off feeding
for that business; and nothing else offering, they will continue this
headlong circling about a bowlder or any object bulking large in their
immediate neighborhood remotely resembling the appurtenances of man, as
if they had learned nothing since they were free to find licks for
themselves, except that salt comes by bestowal and in conjunction with
the vaguely indeterminate lumps of matter that associate with man. As if
in fifty centuries of man-herding they had made but one step out of the
terrible isolation of brute species, an isolation impenetrable except by
fear to every other brute, but now admitting the fact without knowledge,
of the God of the Salt. Accustomed to receiving this miracle on open
bowlders, when the craving is strong upon them, they seek such as these
to run about, vociferating, as if they said, In such a place our God has
been wont to bless us, come now, let us greatly entreat Him. This one
quavering bleat, unmistakable to the sheepman even at a distance, is the
only new note in the sheep's vocabulary, and the only one which passes
with intention from himself to man. As for the call of distress which a
leader raised by hand may make to his master, it is not new, is not
common to flock usage, and is swamped utterly in the obsession of the
flock-mind.
My purpose in this paper is to discuss a group of curious and useless
emotional instincts of social animals, which have not yet been properly
explained. Excepting two of the number, placed first and last in the
list, they are not related in their origin; consequently they are here
grouped together arbitrarily, only for the reason that we are very
familiar with them on account of their survival in our domestic animals,
and because they are, as I have said, useless; also because they
resemble each other, among the passions and actions of the lower
animals, in their effect on our minds. This is in all cases unpleasant,
and sometimes exceedingly painful, as when species that rank next to
ourselves in their developed intelligence and organized societies, such
as elephants, monkeys, dogs, and cattle, are seen under the domination
of impulses, in some cases resembling insanity, and in others simulating
the darkest passions of man.
These instincts are:
(1) The excitement caused by the smell of blood, noticeable in horses
and cattle among our domestic animals, and varying greatly in degree,
from an emotion so slight as to be scarcely perceptible to the greatest
extremes of rage or terror.
(2) The angry excitement roused in some animals when a scarlet or bright
red cloth is shown to them. So well known is this apparently insane
instinct in our cattle that it has given rise to a proverb and metaphor
familiar in a variety of forms to everyone.
(3) The persecution of a sick or weakly animal by its companions.
(4) The sudden deadly fury that seizes on the herd or family at the
sight of a companion in extreme distress. Herbivorous mammals at such
times will trample and gore the distressed one to death. In the case of
wolves, and other savage-tempered carnivorous species, the distressed
fellow is frequently torn to pieces and devoured on the spot.
To take the first two together. When we consider that blood is red; that
the smell of it is, or may be, or has been, associated with that vivid
hue in the animal's mind; that blood, seen and smelt, is, or has been,
associated with the sight of wounds and with cries of pain and rage or
terror from the wounded or captive animal, there appears at first sight
to be some reason for connecting these two instinctive passions as
having the same origin—namely, terror and rage caused by the sight of a
member of the herd struck down and bleeding, or struggling for life in
the grasp of an enemy. I do not mean to say that such an image is
actually present in the animal's mind, but that the inherited or
instinctive passion is one in kind and in its working with the passion
of the animal when experience and reason were its guides.
But the more I consider the point, the more am I inclined to regard
these two instincts as separate in their origin, although I retain the
belief that cattle and horses and several wild animals are violently
excited by the smell of blood for the reason just given—namely, their
inherited memory associates the smell of blood with the presence among
them of some powerful enemy that threatens their life.
The following incident will show how violently this blood passion
sometimes affects cattle, when they are permitted to exist in a
half-wild condition, as on the Pampas. I was out with my gun one day, a
few miles from home, when I came across a patch on the ground where the
grass was pressed or trodden down and stained with blood. I concluded
that some thievish Gauchos had slaughtered a fat cow there on the
previous night, and, to avoid detection, had somehow managed to carry
the whole of it away on their horses. As I walked on, a herd of cattle,
numbering about three hundred, appeared moving slowly on to a small
stream a mile away; they were traveling in a thin, long line, and would
pass the blood-stained spot at a distance of seven to eight hundred
yards, but the wind from it would blow across their track. When the
tainted wind struck the leaders of the herd they instantly stood still,
raising their heads, then broke out into loud, excited bellowings; and
finally turning, they started off at a fast trot, following up the scent
in a straight line, until they arrived at the place where one of their
kind had met its death. The contagion spread, and before long all the
cattle were congregated on the fatal spot, and began moving round in a
dense mass, bellowing continually.
It may be remarked here that the animal has a peculiar language on
occasions like this; it emits a succession of short, bellowing cries,
like excited exclamations, followed by a very loud cry, alternately
sinking into a hoarse murmur and rising to a kind of scream that grates
harshly on the sense. Of the ordinary "cow-music" I am a great admirer,
and take as much pleasure in it as in the cries and melody of birds and
the sound of the wind in trees; but this performance of cattle excited
by the smell of blood is most distressing to hear.
The animals that had forced their way into the center of the mass to the
spot where the blood was, pawed the earth, and dug it up with their
horns, and trampled each other down in their frantic excitement. It was
terrible to see and hear them. The action of those on the border of the
living mass, in perpetually moving round in a circle with dolorous
bellowings, was like that of the women in an Indian village when a
warrior dies, and all night they shriek and howl with simulated grief,
going round and round the dead man's hut in an endless procession.
Wolves are the most sociable of beasts of prey. Not only do they gather
in bands, but they arrange to render each other assistance, which is the
most important test of sociability. The most gray wolves I ever saw in a
band was five. This was in northern New Mexico in January, 1894. The
most I ever heard of in a band was thirty-two that were seen in the same
region. These bands are apparently formed in winter only. The packs are
probably temporary associations of personal acquaintances, for some
temporary purpose, or passing reason, such as food question or
mating-instinct. As soon as this is settled, they scatter.
An instance in point was related to me by Mr. Gordon Wright of Carberry,
Manitoba. During the winter of 1865 he was logging at Sturgeon Lake,
Ontario. One Sunday he and some companions strolled out on the ice of
the lake to look at the logs there. They heard the hunting-cry of
wolves, then a deer (a female) darted from the woods to the open ice.
Her sides were heaving, her tongue out, and her legs cut by the slight
crust of the snow. Evidently she was hard pressed. She was coming toward
them, but one of the men gave a shout which caused her to sheer off. A
minute later six timber wolves appeared galloping on her trail, heads
low, tails horizontal, and howling continuously. They were uttering
their hunting-cry, but as soon as they saw her they broke into a louder,
different note, left the trail and made straight for her. Five of the
wolves were abreast and one that seemed much darker was behind. Within
half a mile they overtook her and pulled her down, all seemed to seize
her at once. For a few minutes she bleated like a sheep in distress;
after that the only sound was the snarling and the crunching of the
wolves as they feasted. Within fifteen minutes nothing was left of the
deer but hair and some of the larger bones, and the wolves fighting
among themselves for even these. Then they scattered, each going a
quarter of a mile or so, no two in the same direction, and those that
remained in view curled up there on the open lake to sleep. This
happened about ten in the morning within three hundred yards of several
witnesses.
In its ordinary sense the word "crowd" means a gathering of individuals
of whatever nationality, profession, or sex, and whatever be the chances
that have brought them together. From the psychological point of view
the expression "crowd" assumes quite a different signification. Under
certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an
agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from
those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all
the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their
conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless
transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The
gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I
will call an organized crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable,
a psychological crowd. It forms a single being, and is subjected to the
law of the mental unity of crowds.
It is evident that it is not by the mere fact of a number of individuals
finding themselves accidentally side by side that they acquire the
character of an organized crowd. A thousand individuals accidentally
gathered in a public place without any determined object in no way
constitute a crowd, from the psychological point of view. To acquire the
special characteristics of such a crowd, the influence is necessary of
certain predisposing causes, of which we shall have to determine the
nature.
The disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings
and thoughts in a definite direction, which are the primary
characteristics of a crowd about to become organized, do not always
involve the simultaneous presence of a number of individuals on one
spot. Thousands of isolated individuals may acquire at certain moments,
and under the influence of certain violent emotions—such, for example,
as a great national event—the characteristics of a psychological crowd.
It will be sufficient in that case that a mere chance should bring them
together for their acts at once to assume the characteristics peculiar
to the acts of a crowd. At certain moments half a dozen men might
constitute a psychological crowd, which may not happen in the case of
hundreds of men gathered together by accident. On the other hand, an
entire nation, though there may be no visible agglomeration, may become
a crowd under the action of certain influences.
It is not easy to describe the mind of crowds with exactness, because
its organization varies not only according to race and composition but
also according to the nature and intensity of the exciting causes to
which crowds are subjected. The same difficulty, however, presents
itself in the psychological study of an individual. It is only in novels
that individuals are found to traverse their whole life with an
unvarying character. It is only the uniformity of the environment that
creates the apparent uniformity of characters. I have shown elsewhere
that all mental constitutions contain possibilities of character which
may be manifested in consequence of a sudden change of environment. This
explains how it was that among the most savage members of the French
Convention were to be found inoffensive citizens who, under ordinary
circumstances, would have been peaceable notaries or virtuous
magistrates. The storm past, they resumed their normal character of
quiet, law-abiding citizens. Napoleon found amongst them his most docile
servants.
It being impossible to study here all the successive degrees of
organization of crowds, we shall concern ourselves more especially with
such crowds as have attained to the phase of complete organization. In
this way we shall see what crowds may become, but not what they
invariably are. It is only in this advanced phase of organization that
certain new and special characteristics are superposed on the unvarying
and dominant character of the race; then takes place that turning,
already alluded to, of all the feelings and thoughts of the collectivity
in an identical direction. It is only under such circumstances, too,
that what I have called above the psychological law of the mental unity
of crowds comes into play.
The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the
following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or
unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or
their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a
crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes
them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which
each individual of them would feel, think, and act, were he in a state
of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come
into being or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case
of individuals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional
being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined,
exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their
reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from
these possessed by each of the cells singly.
Contrary to an opinion which one is astonished to find coming from the
pen of so acute a philosopher as Herbert Spencer, in the aggregate which
constitutes a crowd there is in no sort a summing-up of or an average
struck between its elements. What really takes place is a combination
followed by the creation of new characteristics, just as in chemistry
certain elements, when brought into contact—bases and acids, for
example—combine to form a new body possessing properties quite
different from those of the bodies that have served to form it.
It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a crowd
differs from the isolated individual, but it is less easy to discover
the causes of this difference. To obtain, at any rate, a glimpse of them
it is necessary in the first place to call to mind the truth established
by modern psychology that unconscious phenomena play an altogether
preponderating part not only in organic life but also in the operations
of the intelligence. The conscious life of the mind is of small
importance in comparison with its unconscious life. The most subtle
analyst, the most acute observer, is scarcely successful in discovering
more than a very small number of the unconscious motives that determine
his conduct.
The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives
which escape our observation. It is more especially with respect to
those unconscious elements that all the individuals belonging to it
resemble each other, while it is principally in respect to the conscious
elements of their character—the fruit of education, and yet more of
exceptional hereditary conditions—that they differ from each other. Men
most unlike in the matter of their intelligence possess instincts,
passions, and feelings that are very similar. In the case of everything
that belongs to the realm of sentiment—religion, politics, morality,
the affections and antipathies, etc.—the most eminent men seldom
surpass the standard of the most ordinary individuals. From the
intellectual point of view an abyss may exist between a great
mathematician and his bootmaker, but from the point of view of character
the difference is most often slight or nonexistent.
It is precisely these general qualities of character, governed by forces
of which we are unconscious, and possessed by the majority of the normal
individuals of a race in much the same degree, it is precisely these
qualities that in crowds become common property. In the collective mind
the intellectual aptitudes of the individuals, and in consequence their
individuality, are weakened. The heterogeneous is swamped by the
homogeneous, and the unconscious qualities obtain the upper hand.
This very fact that crowds possess in common ordinary qualities explains
why they can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of
intelligence. The decisions affecting matters of general interest come
to by an assembly of men of distinction, but specialists in different
walks of life, are not sensibly superior to the decisions that would be
adopted by a gathering of imbeciles. The truth is, they can only bring
to bear in common on the work in hand those mediocre qualities which are
the birthright of every average individual. In crowds it is stupidity
and not mother-wit that is accumulated. It is not all the world, as is
so often repeated, that has more wit than Voltaire, but assuredly
Voltaire that has more wit than all the world, if by "all the world"
crowds are to be understood.
If the individuals of a crowd confined themselves to putting in common
the ordinary qualities of which each of them has his share, there would
merely result the striking of an average, and not, as we have said is
actually the case, the creation of new characteristics. How is it that
these new characteristics are created? This is what we are now to
investigate.
Different causes determine the appearance of these characteristics
peculiar to crowds and not possessed by isolated individuals. The first
is that the individual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from
numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows
him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce
have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself
from the consideration that, a crowd being anonymous and in consequence
irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls
individuals disappears entirely.
The second cause, which is contagion, also intervenes to determine the
manifestation in crowds of their special characteristics, and at the
same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which
it is easy to establish the presence, but which it is not easy to
explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order.
In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such
a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to
the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his
nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable except when he makes part
of a crowd.
A third cause, and by far the most important, determines in the
individuals of a crowd special characteristics which are quite contrary
at times to those presented by the isolated individual. I allude to that
suggestibility of which, moreover, the contagion mentioned above is
neither more nor less than an effect.
The most careful observations seem to prove that an individual immerged
for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself—either
in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from
some other cause of which we are ignorant—in a special state, which
much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized
individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer.
Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a
psychological crowd. He is no longer conscious of his acts. In his case,
as in the case of the hypnotized subject, at the same time that certain
faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree of
exaltation. Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake the
accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity. This
impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of crowds than in that
of the hypnotized subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the
same for all the individuals of the crowd, it gains in strength by
reciprocity. The individualities in the crowd who might possess a
personality sufficiently strong to resist the suggestion are too few in
number to struggle against the current. At the utmost, they may be able
to attempt a diversion by means of different suggestions. It is in this
way, for instance, that a happy expression, an image opportunely evoked,
have occasionally deterred crowds from the most bloodthirsty acts.
We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the
predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of
suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical
direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas
into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the
individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has
become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.
Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a
man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he
may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is,
a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the
violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive
beings.
An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand,
which the wind stirs up at will. It is for these reasons that juries are
seen to deliver verdicts of which each individual juror would
disapprove, that parliamentary assemblies adopt laws and measures of
which each of their members would disapprove in his own person. Taken
separately, the men of the Convention were enlightened citizens of
peaceful habits. United in a crowd, they did not hesitate to give their
adhesion to the most savage proposals, to guillotine individuals most
clearly innocent, and, contrary to their interest, to renounce their
inviolability and to decimate themselves.
The conclusion to be drawn from what precedes is that the crowd is
always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual, but that,
from the point of view of feelings and of the acts these feelings
provoke, the crowd may, according to circumstances, be better or worse
than the individual. All depends on the nature of the suggestion to
which the crowd is exposed. This is the point that has been completely
misunderstood by writers who have only studied crowds from the criminal
point of view. Doubtless a crowd is often criminal, but also it is often
heroic. It is crowds rather than isolated individuals that may be
induced to run the risk of death to secure the triumph of a creed or an
idea, that may be fired with enthusiasm for glory and honor, that are
led on—almost without bread and without arms, as in the age of the
Crusades—to deliver the tomb of Christ from the infidel, or, as in '93,
to defend the fatherland. Such heroism is without doubt somewhat
unconscious, but it is of such heroism that history is made. Were
peoples only to be credited with the great actions performed in cold
blood, the annals of the world would register but few of them.
A crowd in the ordinary sense of that term is any chance collection of
individuals. Such a collectivity becomes a crowd in the sociological
sense only when a condition of rapport has been established among the
individuals who compose it.
Rapport implies the existence of a mutual responsiveness, such that
every member of the group reacts immediately, spontaneously, and
sympathetically to the sentiments and attitudes of every other member.
The fact that A responds sympathetically toward B and C implies the
existence in A of an attitude of receptivity and suggestibility toward
the sentiments and attitudes of B and C. Where A, B, and C are mutually
sympathetic, the inhibitions which, under ordinary circumstances, serve
to preserve the isolation and self-consciousness of individuals are
relaxed or completely broken down. Under these circumstances each
individual, in so far as he may be said to reflect, in his own
consciousness and in his emotional reactions, the sentiments and
emotions of all the others, tends at the same time to modify the
sentiments and attitudes of those others. The effect is to produce a
heightened, intensified, and relatively impersonal state of
consciousness in which all seem to share, but which is, at the same
time, relatively independent of each.
The development of this so-called "group-consciousness" represents a
certain amount of loss of self-control on the part of the individual.
Such control as the individual loses over himself is thus automatically
transferred to the group as a whole or to the leader.
What is meant by rapport in the group may be illustrated by a somewhat
similar phenomenon which occurs in hypnosis. In this case a relation is
established between the experimenter and his subject such that the
subject responds automatically to every suggestion of the experimenter
but is apparently oblivious of suggestions coming from other persons
whose existence he does not perceive or ignores. This is the condition
called "isolated rapport."[305]
In the case of the crowd this mutual and exclusive responsiveness of
each member of the crowd to the suggestions emanating from the other
members produces here also a kind of mental isolation which is
accompanied by an inhibition of the stimuli and suggestions that control
the behavior of individuals under the conditions of ordinary life. Under
these conditions impulses long repressed in the individual may find an
expression in the crowd. It is this, no doubt, which accounts for those
so-called criminal and atavistic tendencies of crowds, of which Le Bon
and Sighele speak.[306]
The organization of the crowd is only finally effected when the
attention of the individuals who compose it becomes focused upon some
particular object or some particular objective. This object thus fixed
in the focus of the attention of the group tends to assume the character
of a collective representation.[307] It becomes this because it is the
focus of the collectively enhanced emotion and sentiment of the group.
It becomes the representation and the symbol of what the crowd feels and
wills at the moment when all members are suffused with a common
collective excitement and dominated by a common and collective idea.
This excitement and this idea with the meanings that attach to it are
called collective because they are a product of the interactions of the
members of the crowd. They are not individual but corporate products.
Le Bon describes the organization thus effected in a chance-met
collection of individuals as a "collective mind," and refers to the
group, transitory and ephemeral though it be, as a "single being."
The positive factors in determining the organization of the crowd are
then:
(1) A condition of rapport among the members of the group with a
certain amount of contagious excitement and heightened suggestibility
incident to it.
(2) A certain degree of mental isolation of the group following as a
consequence of the rapport and sympathetic responsiveness of members
of the group.
(3) Focus of attention; and finally the consequent.
(4) Collective representation.
It was near the middle of July when the steamer Excelsior arrived in
San Francisco from St. Michael's, on the west coast of Alaska, with
forty miners, having among them seven hundred and fifty thousand
dollars' worth of gold, brought down from the Klondike. When the bags
and cans and jars containing it had been emptied and the gold piled on
the counters of the establishment to which it was brought, no such sight
had been seen in San Francisco since the famous year of 1849.
On July 18 the Portland arrived in Seattle, on Puget Sound, having on
board sixty-eight miners, who brought ashore bullion worth a million
dollars. The next day it was stated that these miners had in addition
enough gold concealed about their persons and in their baggage to double
the first estimate. Whether all these statements were correct or not
does not signify, for those were the reports that were spread throughout
the states. From this last source alone, the mint at San Francisco
received half a million dollars' worth of gold in one week, and it was
certain that men who had gone away poor had come back with fortunes. It
was stated that a poor blacksmith who had gone up from Seattle returned
with $115,000, and that a man from Fresno, who had failed as a farmer,
had secured $135,000.
The gold fever set in with fury and attacked all classes. Men in good
positions, with plenty of money to spend on an outfit, and men with
little beyond the amount of their fare, country men and city men, clerks
and professional men without the faintest notion of the meaning of
"roughing it," flocked in impossible numbers to secure a passage. There
were no means of taking them. Even in distant New York, the offices of
railroad companies and local agencies were besieged by anxious
inquirers eager to join the throng. On Puget Sound, mills, factories,
and smelting works were deserted by their employees, and all the miners
on the upper Skeena left their work in a body. On July 21 the North
American Transportation Company (one of two companies which monopolized
the trade of the Yukon) was reincorporated in Chicago with a quadrupled
capital, to cope with the demands of traffic. At the different Pacific
ports every available vessel was pressed into the service, and still the
wild rush could not be met. Before the end of July the Portland left
Seattle again for St. Michael's, and the Mexico and Topeka for Dyea;
the Islander and Tees sailed for Dyea from Victoria, and the G. W.
Elder from Portland; while from San Francisco the Excelsior, of the
Alaska Company, which had brought the first gold down, left again for
St. Michael's on July 28, being the last of the company's fleet
scheduled to connect with the Yukon river boats for the season. Three
times the original price was offered for the passage, and one passenger
accepted an offer of $1,500 for the ticket for which he had paid only
$150.
This, however, was only the beginning of the rush. Three more steamers
were announced to sail in August for the mouth of the Yukon, and at
least a dozen more for the Lynn Canal, among which were old tubs, which,
after being tied up for years, were now overhauled and refitted for the
voyage north. One of these was the Williamette, an old collier with
only sleeping quarters for the officers and crew, which, however, was
fitted up with bunks and left Seattle for Dyea and Skagway with 850
passengers, 1,200 tons of freight, and 300 horses, men, live stock, and
freight being wedged between decks till the atmosphere was like that of
a dungeon; and even with such a prospect in view, it was only by a
lavish amount of tipping that a man could get his effects taken aboard.
Besides all these, there were numerous scows loaded with provisions and
fuel, and barges conveying horses for packing purposes.
A frightful state of congestion followed as each successive steamer on
its arrival at the head of the Lynn Canal poured forth its crowds of
passengers and added to the enormous loads of freight already
accumulated. Matters became so serious that on August 10 the United
States Secretary of the Interior, having received information that 3,000
persons with 2,000 tons of baggage and freight were then waiting to
cross the mountains to Yukon, and that many more were preparing to join
them, issued a warning to the public (following that of the Dominion
Government of the previous week) in which he called attention to the
exposure, privation, suffering, and danger incident to the journey at
that advanced period of the season, and further referred to the gravity
of the possible consequences to people detained in the mountainous
wilderness during five or six months of Arctic winter, where no relief
could reach them.
To come now to the state of things at the head of the Lynn Canal, where
the steamers discharged their loads of passengers, horses, and freight.
This was done either at Dyea or Skagway, the former being the
landing-place for the Chilcoot Pass, and the latter for the White Pass,
the distance between the two places being about four miles by sea. There
were no towns at these places, nor any convenience for landing except a
small wharf at Skagway, which was not completed, the workmen having been
smitten with the gold fever. Every man had to bring with him, if he
wanted to get through and live, supplies for a year: sacks of flour,
slabs of bacon, beans, and so forth, his cooking utensils, his mining
outfit and building tools, his tent, and all the heavy clothing and
blankets suitable for the northern winter, one thousand pounds' weight
at least. Imagine the frightful mass of stuff disgorged as each
successive vessel arrived, with no adequate means of taking it inland!
Before the end of September people were preparing to winter on the
coast, and Skagway was growing into a substantial town. Where in the
beginning of August there were only a couple of shacks, there were in
the middle of October 700 wooden buildings and a population of about
1,500. Businesses of all kinds were carried on, saloons and low gaming
houses and haunts of all sorts abounded, but of law and order there was
none. Dyea also, which at one time was almost deserted, was growing into
a place of importance, but the title of every lot in both towns was in
dispute. Rain was still pouring down, and without high rubber boots
walking was impossible. None indeed but the most hardy could stand
existence in such places, and every steamer from the south carried fresh
loads of people back to their homes.
Of the 6,000 people who went in this fall, 200 at the most got over to
the Dawson Route by the White Pass, and perhaps 700 by the Chilcoot.
There were probably 1,000 camped at Lake Bennett, and all the rest,
except the 1,500 remaining on the coast, had returned home to wait till
midwinter or the spring before venturing up again. The question of which
was the best trail was still undecided, and men vehemently debated it
every day with the assistance of the most powerful language at their
command.
As to the crowds who had gone to St. Michael's, it is doubtful whether
any of them got through to Dawson City, since the lower Yukon is
impassable by the end of September, and, at any rate, in view of the
prospects of short rations, it would have been rash to try. The
consequence would be that they would have to remain on that desolate
island during nine months of almost Arctic winter, for the river does
not open again till the end of June. Here they would be absolutely
without employment unless they chose to stack wood for the steamboat
companies, and their only amusements (save the mark) would be drinking
bad rye whiskey—for Alaska is a "prohibition" country—and
poker-playing. For men with a soul above such delights, the
heart-breaking monotony of a northern winter would be appalling, and it
is only to be understood by those who have had to endure similar
experiences themselves on the western prairies.
On the evening of December 23, 1873, there might have been seen in the
streets of Hillsboro, Ohio, persons singly or in groups wending their
way to Music Hall, where a lecture on temperance was to be delivered by
Dr. Dio Lewis, of Boston, Massachusetts.
Hillsboro is a small place, containing something more than 3,000 people.
The inhabitants are rather better educated than is usually the case in
small towns, and its society is indeed noted in that part of the country
for its quietude, culture, and refinement.
But Hillsboro was by no means exempt from the prevailing scourge of
intemperance. The early settlers of Hillsboro were mostly from Virginia,
and brought with them the old-fashioned ideas of hospitality. For many
years previous to the crusade the professional men, and especially of
the bar, were nearly all habitual drinkers, and many of them very
dissipated. When a few earnest temperance men, among whom was Governor
Allen Trimble, initiated a total-abstinence movement in or about the
year 1830, the pulpit took up arms against them, and a condemnatory
sermon was preached in one of the churches.
Thus it was that, although from time to time men, good and true, banded
themselves together in efforts to break up this dreadful state of things
and reform society, all endeavors seemed to fail of any permanent
effect.
The plan laid down by Dr. Lewis challenged attention by its novelty at
least. He believed the work of temperance reform might be successfully
carried on by women if they would set about it in the right
manner—going to the saloon-keeper in a spirit of Christian love, and
persuading him for the sake of humanity and his own eternal welfare to
quit the hateful, soul-destroying business. The doctor spoke with
enthusiasm; and seeing him so full of faith, the hearts of the women
seized the hope—a forlorn one, 'tis true, but still a hope—and when
Dr. Lewis asked if they were willing to undertake the task, scores of
women rose to their feet, and there was no lack of good men who pledged
themselves to encourage and sustain the women in their work.
At a subsequent meeting an organization was effected and Mrs. Eliza J.
Thompson, a daughter of ex-Governor Trimble of Ohio, was elected
chairman. Mrs. Thompson gives the following account of the manner in
which the crusade was organized:
My boy came home from Dr. Dio Lewis' lecture and said, "Ma,
they've got you into business"; and went on to tell that Dio
Lewis had incidentally related the successful effort of his
mother, by prayer and persuasion, to close the saloon in a town
where he lived when a boy, and that he had exhorted the women
of Hillsboro to do the same, and fifty had risen up to signify
their willingness, and that they looked to me to help them to
carry out their promise. As I'm talking to you here familiarly,
I'll go on to say that my husband, who had retired, and was in
an adjoining room, raised up on his elbow and called out, "Oh!
that's all tomfoolery!" I remember I answered him something
like this: "Well, husband, the men have been in the tomfoolery
business a long time; perhaps the Lord is going to call us into
partnership with them." I said no more. The next morning my
brother-in-law, Colonel ——, came in and told me about the
meeting, and said, "Now, you must be sure to go to the women's
meeting at the church this morning; they look to see you
there." Our folks talked it all over, and my husband said,
"Well, we all know where your mother'll take this case for
counsel," and then he pointed to the Bible and left the room.
I went into the corner of my room, and knelt down and opened my
Bible to see what God would say to me. Just at that moment
there was a tap on the door and my daughter entered. She was in
tears; she held her Bible in her hand, open to the 146th Psalm.
She said, "Ma, I just opened to this, and I think it is for
you," and then she went away, and I sat down and read
"Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom
there is no help. Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for
his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God; which keepeth
truth forever; which executeth judgment for the oppressed; the
Lord looseth the prisoners; the Lord openeth the eyes of the
blind; the Lord raiseth them that are bowed down; the Lord
loveth the righteous; the Lord relieveth the fatherless and the
widow—but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down. The
Lord shall reign forever, even thy God, O Zion, unto all
generations. Praise ye the Lord!"
I knew that was for me, and I got up, put on my shoes, and
started. I went to the church, in this town where I was born. I
sat down quietly in the back part of the audience room, by the
stove. A hundred ladies were assembled. I heard my name—heard
the whisper pass through the company, "Here she is!" "She's
come!" and before I could get to the pulpit, they had put me
"in office"—I was their leader.
Many of our citizens were there, and our ministers also. They
stayed a few minutes, and then rose and went out, saying, "This
is your work—we leave it with the women and the Lord." When
they had gone, I just opened the big pulpit Bible and read that
146th Psalm, and told them the circumstance of my selecting it.
The women sobbed so I could hardly go on. When I had finished,
I felt inspired to call on a dear Presbyterian lady to pray.
She did so without the least hesitation, though it was the
first audible prayer in her life. I can't tell you anything
about that prayer, only that the words were like fire.
When she had prayed, I said—and it all came to me just at the
moment—"Now, ladies, let us file out, two by two, the smallest
first, and let us sing as we go, 'Give to the winds thy
fears.'"
We went first to John ——'s saloon. Now, John was a German,
and his sister had lived in my family thirteen years, and she
was very mild and gentle, and I hoped it might prove a family
trait, but I found out it wasn't. He fumed about dreadfully and
said, "It's awful; it's a sin and a shame to pray in a saloon!"
But we prayed right on just the same.
Next day the ladies held another meeting, but decided not to make any
visitations, it being Christmas day, and the hotel-keepers more than
usually busy and not likely to listen very attentively to our
proposition.
On the twenty-sixth, the hotels and saloons were visited; Mrs. Thompson
presenting the appeal. And it was on this morning, and at the saloon of
Robert Ward, that there came a break in the established routine. "Bob"
was a social, jolly sort of fellow, and his saloon was a favorite
resort, and there were many women in the company that morning whose
hearts were aching in consequence of his wrong-doing. Ward was evidently
touched. He confessed that it was a "bad business," said if he could
only "afford to quit it he would," and then tears began to flow from his
eyes. Many of the ladies were weeping, and at length, as if by
inspiration, Mrs. Thompson kneeled on the floor of the saloon, all
kneeling with her, even the saloonist, and prayed, pleading with
indescribable pathos and earnestness for the conversion and salvation of
this and all saloon-keepers. When the amen was sobbed rather than
spoken, Mrs. Washington Doggett's sweet voice began, "There is a
fountain," etc., in which all joined; the effect was most solemn, and
when the hymn was finished the ladies went quietly away, and that was
the first saloon prayer meeting.
There was a saloon-keeper brought from Greenfield to H—— to be tried
under the Adair law. The poor mother who brought the suit had besought
him not to sell to her son—"her only son." He replied roughly that he
would sell to him "as long as he had a dime." Another mother, an old
lady, made the same request, "lest," she said, "he may some day fill a
drunkard's grave." "Madam," he replied, "your son has as good a right to
fill a drunkard's grave as any other mother's son." And in one of the
Hillsboro saloons a lady saw her nephew. "O, Mr. B——," said she,
"don't sell whiskey to that boy: if he has one drink he will want
another, and he may die a drunkard." "Madam, I will sell to him if it
sends his soul to hell," was the awful reply. The last man is a
peculiarly hard, stony sort of man; his lips look as if chiseled out of
flint, a man to be afraid of. One morning, when the visiting band
reached his door, they found him in a very bad humor. He locked his door
and seated himself on the horse block in front in a perfect rage,
clenched his fist, swore furiously, and ordered us to go home. Some
gentlemen, on the opposite side of the street, afterward said that they
were watching the scene, ready to rush over and defend the ladies from
an attack, and they were sure it would come; but one of the ladies, a
sweet-souled woman, gentle and placid, kneeled just at his feet, and
poured out such a tender, earnest prayer for him, that he quieted down
entirely, and when she rose and offered him her hand in token of kind
feeling, he could not refuse to take it.
During the Crusade, a saloon-keeper (at Ocean Grove) consented
to close his business. There was a great deal of enthusiasm and
interest, and we women decided to compensate the man for his
whiskey and make a bonfire of it in the street. A great crowd
gathered about the saloon, and the barrels of whiskey were
rolled out to the public square where we were to have our
bonfire. Myself and two other little women, who had been chosen
to knock in the heads, and had come to the place with axes
concealed under our shawls, went to our work with a will.
I didn't know I was so strong, but I lifted that axe like a
woodman and brought it down with such force that the first blow
stove in the head of a barrel and splashed the whiskey in every
direction. I was literally baptized with the noxious stuff. The
intention was to set it on fire, and we had brought matches for
that purpose, but it would not burn! It was a villainous
compound of some sort, but we had set out to have a fire, and
were determined by some means or other to make it burn, so we
sent for some coal oil and poured it on and we soon had a
blaze. The man who could sell such liquors would not be likely
to keep the pledge. He is selling liquors again.
The crusade began at Washington C.H. only two days later than at
Hillsboro. And Washington C.H. was the first place where the crusade was
made prominent and successful.
On Friday morning, December 26, 1873, after an hour of prayer in the
M.E. Church, forty-four women filed slowly and solemnly down the aisle,
and started forth upon their strange mission with fear and trembling,
while the male portion of the audience remained at the church to pray
for the success of this new undertaking; the tolling of the church-bell
keeping time to the solemn march of the women, as they wended their way
to the first drug-store on the list. (The number of places within the
city limits where intoxicating drinks were sold was fourteen—eleven
saloons and three drug-stores.) Here, as in every place, they entered
singing, every woman taking up the sacred strain as she crossed the
threshold. This was followed by the reading of the appeal and prayer;
then earnest pleading to desist from their soul-destroying traffic and
sign the dealer's pledge.
Thus, all the day long, they went from place to place, without stopping
even for dinner or lunch, till five o'clock, meeting with no marked
success; but invariably courtesy was extended to them; not even their
reiterated promise, "We will call again," seeming to offend.
No woman who has ever entered one of these dens of iniquity on such an
errand needs to be told of the heartsickness that almost over-came them
as they, for the first time, saw behind those painted windows or green
blinds, or entered the little stifling "back room," or found their way
down winding steps into the damp, dark cellars, and realized that into
such places those they loved best were being landed, through the
allurements of the brilliantly lighted drug-store, the fascinating
billiard table, or the enticing beer gardens, with their siren
attractions. A crowded house at night, to hear the report of the day's
work, betrayed the rapidly increasing interest in this mission.
On the twenty-seventh the contest really began, and, at the first place,
the doors were found locked. With hearts full of compassion, the women
knelt in the snow upon the pavement, to plead for the divine influence
upon the heart of the liquor-dealer, and there held their first street
prayer meeting.
At night the weary but zealous workers reported at a mass meeting of the
various rebuffs, and the success in having two druggists sign the pledge
not to sell, except upon the written prescription of a physician.
The Sabbath, was devoted to union mass meeting, with direct reference to
the work in hand; and on Monday the number of ladies had increased to
near one hundred. That day, December 29, is one long to be remembered in
Washington, as the day upon which occurred the first surrender ever made
by a liquor-dealer, of his stock of liquors of every kind and variety,
to the women, in answer to their prayers and entreaties, and by them
poured into the street. Nearly a thousand men, women, and children
witnessed the mingling of beer, ale, wine, and whiskey, as they filled
the gutters and were drunk up by the earth, while the bells were
ringing, men and boys shouting, and women singing and praying to God who
had given the victory. But on the fourth day, "stock sale-day," the
campaign had reached its height, the town being filled with visitors
from all parts of the county and adjoining villages. Another public
surrender, and another pouring into the street of a larger stock of
liquors than on the previous day, and more intense excitement and
enthusiasm.
Mass meetings were held nightly, with new victories reported constantly,
until on Friday, January 21, one week from the beginning of the work, at
the public meeting held in the evening, the secretary's report announced
the unconditional surrender of every liquor-dealer, some having shipped
their liquors back to wholesale dealers, others having poured them into
the gutters, and the druggists as all having signed the pledge. Thus a
campaign of prayer and song had, in eight days, closed eleven saloons,
and pledged three drug-stores to sell only on prescription. At first men
had wondered, scoffed, and laughed, then criticized, respected, and
yielded.
Morning prayer and evening mass meetings continued daily, and the
personal pledge was circulated till over one thousand signatures were
obtained. Physicians were called upon to sign a pledge not to prescribe
ardent spirits when any other substitute could be found, and in no case
without a personal examination of the patient.
Early in the third week the discouraging intelligence came that a new
man had taken out a license to sell liquor in one of the deserted
saloons, and that he was backed by a whiskey house in Cincinnati, to the
amount of $5,000, to break down this movement. On Wednesday, 'the
fourteenth, the whiskey was unloaded at his room. About forty women were
on the ground and followed the liquor in, and remained holding an
uninterrupted prayer meeting all day and until eleven o'clock at night.
The next day, bitterly cold, was spent in the same place and manner,
without fire or chairs, two hours of that time the women being locked
in, while the proprietor was off attending a trial. On the following
day, the coldest of the winter of 1874, the women were locked out, and
stood on the street holding religious services all day long.
Next morning a tabernacle was built in the street, just in front of the
house, and was occupied for the double purpose of watching and prayer
through the day; and before night the sheriff closed the saloon, and the
proprietor surrendered; thus ended the third week.
A short time after, on a dying-bed, this four days' liquor-dealer sent
for some of these women, telling them their songs and prayers had never
ceased to ring in his ears, and urging them to pray again in his behalf;
so he passed away.
Thus, through most of the winter of 1874 no alcoholic drinks were
publicly sold as a beverage in the county.
During the two intervening years weekly temperance-league meetings have
been kept up by the faithful few, while frequent union mass meetings
have been held, thus keeping the subject always before the people. Today
the disgraceful and humiliating fact exists that there are more places
where liquors are sold than before the crusade.
The outward life of men in every age is molded upon an inward life
consisting of a framework of traditions, sentiments, and moral
influences which direct their conduct and maintain certain fundamental
notions which they accept without discussion.
Let the resistance of this social framework weaken, and ideas which
could have had no force before will germinate and develop. Certain
theories whose success was enormous at the time of the Revolution would
have encountered an impregnable wall two centuries earlier.
The aim of these considerations is to recall to the reader the fact that
the outward events of revolutions are always a consequence of invisible
transformations which have slowly gone forward in men's minds. Any
profound study of a revolution necessitates a study of the mental soil
upon which the ideas that direct its courses have to germinate.
Generally slow in the extreme, the evolution of ideas is often invisible
for a whole generation. Its extent can only be grasped by comparing the
mental condition of the same social classes at the two extremities of
the curve which the mind has followed.
The actual influence of the philosophers in the genesis of the
Revolution was not that which was attributed to them. They revealed
nothing new, but they developed the critical spirit which no dogma can
resist, once the way is prepared for its downfall.
Under the influence of this developing critical spirit things which were
no longer very greatly respected came to be respected less and less.
When tradition and prestige had disappeared, the social edifice suddenly
fell. This progressive disaggregation finally descended to the people,
but was not commenced by them. The people follow examples, but never set
them.
The philosophers, who could not have exerted any influence over the
people, did exert a great influence over the enlightened portion of the
nation. The unemployed nobility, who had long been ousted from their old
functions and who were consequently inclined to be censorious, followed
their leadership. Incapable of foresight, the nobles were the first to
break with the traditions that were their only raison d'être. As
steeped in humanitarianism and rationalism as the bourgeoisie of
today, they continually sapped their own privileges by their criticisms.
As today, the most ardent reformers were found among the favorites of
fortune. The aristocracy encouraged dissertations on the social
contract, the rights of man, and the equality of citizens. At the
theater it applauded plays which criticized privileges, the
arbitrariness and the incapacity of men in high places, and abuses of
all kinds.
As soon as men lose confidence in the foundations of the mental
framework which guides their conduct, they feel at first uneasy and then
discontented. All classes felt their old motives of action gradually
disappearing. Things that had seemed sacred for centuries were now
sacred no longer.
The censorious spirit of the nobility and of the writers of the day
would not have sufficed to move the heavy load of tradition but that its
action was added to that of other powerful influences. We have already
stated, in citing Bossuet, that under the ancien régime the religious
and civil governments, widely separated in our day, were intimately
connected. To injure one was inevitably to injure the other. Now even
before the monarchical idea was shaken, the force of religious tradition
was greatly diminished among cultivated men. The constant progress of
knowledge had sent an increasing number of minds from theology to
science by opposing the truth observed to the truth revealed.
This mental evolution, although as yet very vague, was sufficient to
show that the traditions which for so many centuries had guided men had
not the value which had been attributed to them, and that it would soon
be necessary to replace them.
But where discover the new elements which might take the place of
tradition? Where seek the magic ring which would raise a new social
edifice on the remains of that which no longer contented men?
Men were agreed in attributing to reason the power that tradition and
the gods seemed to have lost. How could its force be doubted? Its
discoveries having been innumerable, was it not legitimate to suppose
that by applying it to the construction of societies it would entirely
transform them? Its possible function increased very rapidly in the
thoughts of the more enlightened, in proportion as tradition seemed more
and more to be distrusted.
The sovereign power attributed to reason must be regarded as the
culminating idea which not only engendered the Revolution but governed
it throughout. During the whole Revolution men gave themselves up to the
most persevering efforts to break with the past and to erect society
upon a new plan dictated by logic.
Slowly filtering downward, the rationalistic theories of the
philosophers meant to the people simply that all the things which had
been regarded as worthy of respect were now no longer worthy. Men being
declared equal, the old masters need no longer be obeyed. The multitude
easily succeeded in ceasing to respect what the upper classes themselves
no longer respected. When the barrier of respect was down the Revolution
was accomplished.
The first result of this new mentality was a general insubordination.
Mme. Vigée Lebrun relates that on the promenade at Longchamps men of the
people leaped on the footboards of the carriages, saying, "Next year you
will be behind and we shall be inside."
The populace was not alone in manifesting insubordination and
discontent. These sentiments were general on the eve of the Revolution.
"The lesser clergy," says Taine, "are hostile to the prelates; the
provincial gentry to the nobility of the court; the vassals to the
seigneurs; the peasants to the townsmen, etc."
This state of mind, which had been communicated from the nobles and
clergy to the people, also invaded the army. At the moment the States
General were opened, Necker said: "We are not sure of the troops." The
officers were becoming humanitarian and philosophical. The soldiers,
recruited from the lowest class of the population, did not philosophize,
but they no longer obeyed. In their feeble minds the ideas of equality
meant simply the suppression of all leaders and masters, and therefore
of all obedience. In 1790 more than twenty regiments threatened their
officers, and sometimes, as at Nancy, threw them into prison.
The mental anarchy which, after spreading through all classes of
society, finally invaded the army was the principal cause of the
disappearance of the ancien régime. "It was the defection of the army
affected by the ideas of the Third Estate," wrote Rivarol, "that
destroyed royalty."
The genesis of the French Revolution, as well as its duration, was
conditioned by elements of a rational, affective, mystic, and collective
nature, each category of which was ruled by a different logic. The
rational element usually invoked as an explanation exerted in reality
but very slight influence. It prepared the way for the Revolution, but
maintained it only at the outset, while it was still exclusively middle
class. Its action was manifested by many measures of the time, such as
the proposals to reform the taxes, the suppression of the privileges of
a useless nobility, etc.
As soon as the Revolution reached the people, the influence of the
rational elements speedily vanished before that of the affective and
collective elements. As for the mystic elements, the foundation of the
revolutionary faith, they made the army fanatical and propagated the new
belief throughout the world.
We shall see these various elements as they appeared in events and in
the psychology of individuals. Perhaps the most important was the mystic
element. The Revolution cannot be clearly comprehended—we cannot repeat
it too often—unless it is considered as the formation of a religious
belief. What I have said elsewhere of all beliefs applies equally to the
Revolution. They impose themselves on men apart from reason and have the
power to polarize men's thoughts and feelings in one direction. Pure
reason had never such a power, for men were never impassioned by reason.
The religious forms rapidly assumed by the Revolution explain its power
of expansion and the prestige which it possessed and has retained. Few
historians have understood that this great monument ought to be regarded
as the foundation of a new religion. The penetrating mind of
Tocqueville, I believe, was the first to perceive as much. He wrote:
The French Revolution was a political revolution which operated
in the manner of and assumed something of the aspect of a
religious revolution. See by what regular and characteristic
traits it finally resembled the latter; not only did it spread
itself far and wide like a religious revolution, but, like the
latter, it spread itself by means of preaching and propaganda.
A political revolution which inspires proselytes, which is
preached as passionately to foreigners as it is accomplished at
home: consider what a novel spectacle was this.
Although the mystic element is always the foundation of beliefs, certain
affective and rational elements are quickly added thereto. A belief thus
serves to group sentiments and passions and interests which belong to
the affective domain. Reason then envelops the whole, seeking to justify
events in which, however, it played no part whatever.
At the moment of the Revolution everyone, according to his aspirations,
dressed the new belief in a different rational vesture. The peoples saw
in it only the suppression of the religious and political despotisms and
hierarchies under which they had so often suffered. Writers like Goethe
and thinkers like Kant imagined that they saw in it the triumph of
reason. Foreigners like Humboldt came to France "to breathe the air of
liberty and to assist at the obsequies of despotism." These intellectual
illusions did not last long. The evolution of the drama soon revealed
the true foundations of the dream.
Great mass movements, whether these be religious or political, are at
first always difficult to understand. Invariably they challenge existing
moral and intellectual values, the revaluation of which is, for the
normal mind, an exceedingly difficult and painful task. Moreover the
definition of their aims and policies into exact and comprehensive
programs is generally slowly achieved. At their inception and during the
early stages of their development there must needs be many crude and
tentative statements and many rhetorical exaggerations. It is safe to
assert as a rule that at no stage of its history can a great movement
of the masses be fully understood and fairly interpreted by a study of
its formal statements and authentic expositions only. These must be
supplemented by a careful study of the psychology of the men and women
whose ideals and yearnings these statements and expositions aim to
represent. It is not enough to know and comprehend the creed: it is
essential that we also know and comprehend the spiritual factors, the
discontent, the hopes, the fears, the inarticulate visionings of the
human units in the movement. This is of greater importance in the
initial stages than later, when the articulation of the soul of the
movement has become more certain and clear.
No one who has attended many bolshevist meetings or is acquainted with
many of the individuals to whom bolshevism makes a strong appeal will
seriously question the statement that an impressively large number of
those who profess to be Bolshevists present a striking likeness to
extreme religious zealots, not only in the manner of manifesting their
enthusiasm, but also in their methods of exposition and argument. Just
as in religious hysteria a single text becomes a whole creed to the
exclusion of every other text, and instead of being itself subject to
rational tests is made the sole test of the rationality of everything
else, so in the case of the average Bolshevist of this type a single
phrase received into the mind in a spasm of emotion, never tested by the
usual criteria of reason, becomes not only the very essence of truth but
also the standard by which the truth or untruth of everything else must
be determined. Most of the preachers who become pro-Bolshevists are of
this type.
People who possess minds thus affected are generally capable of, and
frequently indulge in, the strictest logical deduction and analysis.
Sometimes they acquire the reputation of being exceptionally brilliant
thinkers because of this power. But the fact is that their initial
ideas, upon which everything is pivoted, are derived emotionally and are
not the results of a deliberate weighing of available evidence. The
initial movement is one of feeling, of emotional impulse. The conviction
thereby created is so strong and so dominant that it cannot be affected
by any purely rational functional factors.
People of this type jump at decisions and reach very positive
convictions upon the most difficult matters with bewildering ease. For
them the complexities and intricacies which trouble the normal mind do
not exist. Everything is either black or white: there are no perplexing
intervening grays. Right is right and wrong is wrong; they do not
recognize that there are doubtful twilight zones. Ideas capable of the
most elaborate expansion and the most subtle intricacies of
interpretation are immaturely grasped and preached with naïve assurance.
Statements alleged to be facts, no matter what their source, if they
seem to support the convictions thus emotionally derived, are received
without any examination and used as conclusive proof, notwithstanding
that a brief investigation would prove them to be worthless as evidence.
If we take the group of American intellectuals who at present are ardent
champions of bolshevism we shall find that, with exceptions so few as to
be almost negligible, they have embraced nearly every "ism" as it arose,
seeing in each one the magic solvent of humanity's ills. Those of an
older generation thus regarded bimetallism, for instance. What else
could be required to make the desert bloom like a garden and to usher in
the earthly Paradise? The younger ones, in their turn, took up
anarchist-communism, Marxian socialism, industrial unionism,
syndicalism, birth control, feminism, and many other movements and
propagandas, each of which in its turn induced ecstatic visions of a new
heaven and a new earth. The same individuals have grown lyrical in
praise of every bizarre and eccentric art fad. In the banal and
grotesque travesties of art produced by cubists, futurists, et al.,
they saw transcendent genius. They are forever seeking new gods and
burying old ones.
It would be going too far to say that these individuals are all
hystericals in the pathological sense, but it is strictly accurate to
say that the class exhibits marked hysterical characteristics and that
it closely resembles the large class of over-emotionalized religious
enthusiasts which furnish so many true hystericals. It is probable that
accidents of environment account for the fact that their emotionalism
takes sociological rather than religious forms. If the sociological
impetus were absent, most of them would be religiously motived to a
state not less abnormal.
To understand the spread of bolshevist agitation and sympathy among a
very considerable part of the working class in this country, we must
take into account the fact that its logical and natural nucleus is the
I.W.W. It is necessary also to emancipate our minds from the obsession
that only "ignorant foreigners" are affected. This is not a true
estimate of either the I.W.W. or the bolshevist propaganda as a whole.
There are indeed many of this class in both, but there are also many
native Americans, sturdy, self-reliant, enterprising, and courageous
men. The peculiar group psychology which we are compelled to study is
less the result of those subtle and complex factors which are
comprehended in the vague term "race" than of the political and economic
conditions by which the group concerned is environed.
The typical native-born I.W.W. member, the "Wobbly" one frequently
encounters in our mid-western and western cities, is very unlike the
hideous and repulsive figure conjured up by sensational cartoonists. He
is much more likely to be a very attractive sort of man. Here are some
characteristics of the type: figure robust, sturdy, and virile; dress
rough but not unclean; speech forthright, deliberate, and bold; features
intelligent, frank, and free from signs of alcoholic dissipation;
movements slow and leisurely as of one averse to over-exertion. There
are thousands of "wobblies" to whom the specifications of this
description will apply. Conversation with these men reveals that, as a
general rule, they are above rather than below the average in sobriety.
They are generally free from family ties, being either unmarried or, as
often happens, wife-deserters. They are not highly educated, few having
attended any school beyond the grammar-school grade. Many of them have,
however, read a great deal more than the average man, though their
reading has been curiously miscellaneous in selection and nearly always
badly balanced. Theology, philosophy, sociology, and economics seem to
attract most attention. In discussion—and every "Wobbly" seems to
possess a passion for disputation—men of this type will manifest a
surprising familiarity with the broad outlines of certain theological
problems, as well as with the scriptural texts bearing upon them. It is
very likely to be the case, however, that they have only read a few
popular classics of what used to be called rationalism—Paine's Age of
Reason, Ingersoll's lectures in pamphlet form, and Haeckel's Riddle of
the Universe are typical. A surprisingly large number can quote
extensively from Buckle's History of Civilization and from the
writings of Marx. They quote statistics freely—statistics of wages,
poverty, crime, vice, and so on—generally derived from the radical
press and implicitly believed because so published, with what they
accept as adequate authority.
Their most marked peculiarity is the migratory nature of their lives.
Whether this is self-determined, a matter of temperament and habit, or
due to uncontrollable factors, it is largely responsible for the
contempt in which they are popularly held. It naturally brings upon them
the reproach and resentment everywhere visited upon "tramps" and
"vagabonds." They rarely remain long enough in any one place to form
local attachments and ties or anything like civic pride. They move from
job to job, city to city, state to state, sometimes tramping afoot,
begging as they go; sometimes stealing rides on railway trains, in
freight cars—"side-door Pullmans"—or on the rods underneath the cars.
Frequently arrested for begging, trespassing, or stealing rides, they
are often victims of injustice at the hands of local judges and
justices. The absence of friends, combined with the prejudice against
vagrants which everywhere exists, subjects them to arbitrary and
high-handed injustice such as no other body of American citizens has to
endure. Moreover, through the conditions of their existence they are
readily suspected of crimes they do not commit; it is all too easy for
the hard-pushed police officer or sheriff to impute a crime to the lone
and defenseless "Wobbly," who frequently can produce no testimony to
prove his innocence, simply because he has no friends in the
neighborhood and has been at pains to conceal his movements. In this
manner the "Wobbly" becomes a veritable son of Ishmael, his hand against
the hand of nearly every man in conventional society. In particular he
becomes a rebel by habit, hating the police and the courts as his
constant enemies.
Doubtless the great majority of these men are temperamentally
predisposed to the unanchored, adventurous, migratory existence which
they lead. Boys so constituted run away to sea, take jobs with traveling
circuses, or enlist as soldiers. The type is familiar and not uncommon.
Such individuals cannot be content with the prosaic, humdrum, monotonous
life of regular employment. As a rule we do not look upon this trait in
boy or man as criminal.
Many a hardworking, intelligent American, who from choice or from
necessity is a migratory worker, following his job, never has an
opportunity to vote for state legislators, for governor, for
congressman or president. He is just as effectively excluded from the
actual electorate as if he were a Chinese coolie, ignorant of our
customs and our speech.
We cannot wonder that such conditions prove prolific breeders of
bolshevism and similar "isms." It would be strange indeed if it were
otherwise. We have no right to expect that men who are so constantly the
victims of arbitrary, unjust, and even brutal treatment at the hands of
our police and our courts will manifest any reverence for the law and
the judicial system. Respect for majority rule in government cannot
fairly be demanded from a disfranchised group. It is not to be wondered
at that the old slogan of socialism, "Strike at the ballot-box!"—the
call to lift the struggle of the classes to the parliamentary level for
peaceful settlement—becomes the desperate, anarchistic I.W.W. slogan,
"Strike at the ballot-box with an ax!" Men who can have no family life
cannot justly be expected to bother about school administration. Men who
can have no home life but only dreary shelter in crowded work-camps or
dirty doss-houses are not going to bother themselves with municipal
housing reforms.
In short, we must wake up to the fact that, as the very heart of our
problem, we have a bolshevist nucleus in America composed of virile,
red-blooded Americans, racy of our soil and history, whose conditions of
life and labor are such as to develop in them the psychology of
reckless, despairing, revengeful bolshevism. They really are little
concerned with theories of the state and of social development, which to
our intellectuals seem to be the essence of bolshevism. They are vitally
concerned only with action. Syndicalism and bolshevism involve speedy
and drastic action—hence the force of their appeal.
Finally, if we would understand why millions of people in all lands have
turned away from old ideals, old loyalties, and old faiths to
bolshevism, with something of the passion and frenzy characteristic of
great messianic movements, we must take into account the intense
spiritual agony and hunger which the Great War has brought into the
lives of civilized men. The old gods are dead and men are everywhere
expectantly waiting for the new gods to arise. The aftermath of the war
is a spiritual cataclysm such as civilized mankind has never before
known. The old religions and moralities are shattered and men are
waiting and striving for new ones. It is a time suggestive of the birth
of new religions. Man cannot live as yet without faith, without some
sort of religion. The heart of the world today is strained with yearning
for new and living faiths to replace the old faiths which are dead. Were
some persuasive fanatic to arise proclaiming himself to be a new
Messiah, and preaching the religion of action, the creation of a new
society, he would find an eager, soul-hungry world already predisposed
to believe.
The corruption of manners which has been general since the restoration
was combated by societies for "the reformation of manners," which in the
last years of the seventeenth century acquired extraordinary dimensions.
They began in certain private societies which arose in the reign of
James II, chiefly under the auspices of Beveridge and Bishop Horneck.
These societies were at first purely devotional, and they appear to have
been almost identical in character with those of the early Methodists.
They held prayer meetings, weekly communions, and Bible-readings; they
sustained charities and distributed religious books, and they cultivated
a warmer and more ascetic type of devotion than was common in the
Church. Societies of this description sprang up in almost every
considerable city in England and even in several of those in Ireland. In
the last years of the seventeenth century we find no less than ten of
them in Dublin. Without, however, altogether discarding their first
character, they assumed, about 1695, new and very important functions.
They divided themselves into several distinct groups, undertaking the
discovery and suppression of houses of ill fame, and the prosecution of
swearers, drunkards, and Sabbath-breakers. They became a kind of
voluntary police, acting largely as spies, and enforcing the laws
against religious offenses. The energy with which this scheme was
carried out is very remarkable. As many as seventy or eighty persons
were often prosecuted in London and Westminster for cursing and
swearing, in a single week. Sunday markets, which had hitherto been not
uncommon, were effectually suppressed. Hundreds of disorderly houses
were closed. Forty or fifty night-walkers were sent every week to
Bridewell, and numbers were induced to emigrate to the colonies. A great
part of the fines levied for these offenses was bestowed on the poor. In
the fortieth annual report of the "Societies for the Reformation of
Manners" which appeared in 1735, it was stated that the number of
prosecutions for debauchery and profaneness in London and Westminster
alone, since the foundation of the societies, had been 99,380.
The term Methodist was a college nickname bestowed upon a small society
of students at Oxford, who met together between 1729 and 1735 for the
purpose of mutual improvement. They were accustomed to communicate every
week, to fast regularly on Wednesdays and Fridays, and on most days
during Lent; to read and discuss the Bible in common, to abstain from
most forms of amusement and luxury, and to visit sick persons and
prisoners in the gaol. John Wesley, the future leader of the religious
revival of the eighteenth century, was the master-spirit of this
society. The society hardly numbered more than fifteen members, and was
the object of much ridicule at the university; but it included some men
who afterward played considerable parts in the world. Among them was
Charles, the younger brother of John Wesley, whose hymns became the
favorite poetry of the sect, and whose gentler, more submissive, and
more amiable character, though less fitted than that of his brother for
the great conflicts of public life, was very useful in moderating the
movement, and in drawing converts to it by personal influence. Charles
Wesley appears to have originated the society at Oxford; he brought
Whitefield into its pale, and besides being the most popular poet he was
one of the most persuasive preachers of the movement.
In the course of 1738 the chief elements of the movement were already
formed. Whitefield had returned from Georgia, Charles Wesley had begun
to preach the doctrine with extraordinary effect to the criminals in
Newgate and from every pulpit into which he was admitted. Methodist
societies had already sprung up under Moravian influence. They were in
part a continuation of the society at Oxford, in part a revival of those
religious societies that have been already noticed as so common after
the Revolution. The design of each was to be a church within a church, a
seedplot of a more fervent piety, the center of a stricter discipline
and a more energetic propagandism than existed in religious communities
at large. In these societies the old Christian custom of love-feasts
was revived. The members sometimes passed almost the whole night in the
most passionate devotions, and voluntarily submitted to a spiritual
tyranny that could hardly be surpassed in a Catholic monastery. They
were to meet every week, to make an open and particular confession of
every frailty, to submit to be crossexamined on all their thoughts,
words, and deeds. The following among others were the questions asked at
every meeting: "What known sin have you committed since our last
meeting? What temptations have you met with? How were you delivered?
What have you thought, said, or done of which you doubt whether it be
sin or not? Have you nothing you desire to keep secret?"
Such rules could only have been accepted under the influence of an
overpowering religious enthusiasm, and there was much truth in the
judgment which the elder brother of John Wesley passed upon them in
1739. "Their societies," he wrote to their mother, "are sufficient to
dissolve all other societies but their own. Will any man of common sense
or spirit suffer any domestic to be in a band engaged to relate to five
or ten people everything without reserve that concerns the person's
conscience how much soever it may concern the family? Ought any married
persons to be there unless husband and wife be there together?"
From this time the leaders of the movement became the most active of
missionaries. Without any fixed parishes they wandered from place to
place, proclaiming their new doctrine in every pulpit to which they were
admitted, and they speedily awoke a passionate enthusiasm and a bitter
hostility in the Church.
We may blame, but we can hardly, I think, wonder at the hostility all
this aroused among the clergy. It is, indeed, certain that Wesley and
Whitefield were at this time doing more than any other contemporary
clergymen to kindle a living piety among the people. Yet before the end
of 1738 the Methodist leaders were excluded from most of the pulpits of
the Church, and were thus compelled, unless they consented to relinquish
what they considered a Divine mission, to take steps in the direction of
separation.
Two important measures of this nature were taken in 1739. One of them
was the creation of Methodist chapels, which were intended not to oppose
or replace, but to be supplemental and ancillary to, the churches, and
to secure that the doctrine of the new birth should be faithfully taught
to the people. The other and still more important event was the
institution by Whitefield of field-preaching. The idea had occurred to
him in London, where he found congregations too numerous for the church
in which he preached, but the first actual step was taken in the
neighborhood of Bristol. At a time when he was himself excluded from the
pulpits at Bristol, and was thus deprived of the chief normal means of
exercising his talents, his attention was called to the condition of the
colliers at Kingswood. He was filled with horror and compassion at
finding in the heart of a Christian country, and in the immediate
neighborhood of a great city, a population of many thousands, sunk in
the most brutal ignorance and vice, and entirely excluded from the
ordinances of religion. Moved by such feelings, he resolved to address
the colliers in their own haunts. The resolution was a bold one, for
field-preaching was then utterly unknown in England, and it needed no
common courage to brave all the obloquy and derision it must provoke,
and to commence the experiment in the center of a half-savage
population. Whitefield, however, had a just confidence in his cause and
in his powers. Standing himself upon a hillside, he took for his text
the first words of the sermon which was spoken from the Mount, and he
addressed with his accustomed fire an astonished audience of some two
hundred men. The fame of his eloquence spread far and wide. On
successive occasions, five, ten, fifteen, even twenty thousand were
present. It was February, but the winter sun shone clear and bright. The
lanes were filled with carriages of the more wealthy citizens, whom
curiosity had drawn from Bristol. The trees and hedges were crowded with
humbler listeners, and the fields were darkened by a compact mass. The
voice of the great preacher pealed with a thrilling power to the
outskirts of that mighty throng. The picturesque novelty of the occasion
and of the scene, the contagious emotion of so great a multitude, a deep
sense of the condition of his hearers and of the momentous importance of
the step he was taking, gave an additional solemnity to his eloquence.
His rude auditors were electrified. They stood for a time in rapt and
motionless attention. Soon tears might be seen forming white gutters
down cheeks blackened from the coal mine. Then sobs and groans told how
hard hearts were melting at his words. A fire was kindled among the
outcasts of Kingswood which burnt long and fiercely, and was destined
in a few years to overspread the land.
But for the simultaneous appearance of a great orator and a great
statesman, Methodism would probably have smouldered and at last perished
like the very similar religious societies of the preceding century.
Whitefield was utterly destitute of the organizing skill which could
alone give a permanence to the movement, and no talent is naturally more
ephemeral than popular oratory; while Wesley, though a great and
impressive preacher, could scarcely have kindled a general enthusiasm
had he not been assisted by an orator who had an unrivaled power of
moving the passions of the ignorant. The institution of field-preaching
by Whitefield in the February of 1739 carried the impulse through the
great masses of the poor, while the foundation by Wesley, in the May of
the same year, of the first Methodist chapel was the beginning of an
organized body capable of securing and perpetuating the results that had
been achieved.
From the time of the institution of lay preachers Methodism became in a
great degree independent of the Established Church. Its chapels
multiplied in the great towns, and its itinerant missionaries penetrated
to the most secluded districts. They were accustomed to preach in fields
and gardens, in streets and lecture-rooms, in market places and
churchyards. On one occasion we find Whitefield at a fair mounting a
stage which had been erected for some wrestlers, and there denouncing
the pleasures of the world; on another, preaching among the mountebanks
at Moorfields; on a third, attracting around his pulpit ten thousand of
the spectators at a race course; on a fourth, standing beside the
gallows at an execution to speak of death and of eternity. Wesley, when
excluded from the pulpit of Epworth, delivered some of his most
impressive sermons in the churchyard, standing on his father's tomb.
Howell Harris, the apostle of Wales, encountering a party of
mountebanks, sprang into their midst exclaiming, in a solemn voice, "Let
us pray," and then proceeded to thunder forth the judgments of the Lord.
Rowland Hill was accustomed to visit the great towns on market day in
order that he might address the people in the market place, and to go
from fair to fair preaching among the revelers from his favorite text,
"Come out from among them." In this manner the Methodist preachers came
in contact with the most savage elements of the population, and there
were few forms of mob violence they did not experience. In 1741 one of
their preachers named Seward, after repeated ill treatment in Wales, was
at last struck on the head while preaching at Monmouth, and died of the
blow. In a riot, while Wheatley was preaching at Norwich, a poor woman
with child perished from the kicks and blows of the mob. At Dublin,
Whitefield was almost stoned to death. At Exeter he was stoned in the
very presence of the bishop. At Plymouth he was violently assaulted and
his life seriously threatened by a naval officer.
Scenes of this kind were of continual occurrence, and they were
interspersed with other persecutions of a less dangerous description.
Drums were beaten, horns blown, guns let off, and blacksmiths hired to
ply their noisy trade in order to drown the voices of the preachers.
Once, at the very moment when Whitefield announced his text, the belfry
gave out a peal loud enough to make him inaudible. On other occasions
packs of hounds were brought with the same object, and once, in order to
excite the dogs to fury, a live cat in a cage was placed in their midst.
Fire engines poured streams of fetid water upon the congregation. Stones
fell so thickly that the faces of many grew crimson with blood. At
Hoxton the mob drove an ox into the midst of the congregation. At
Pensford the rabble, who had been baiting a bull, concluded their sport
by driving the torn and tired animal full against the table on which
Wesley was preaching. Sometimes we find innkeepers refusing to receive
the Methodist leaders in their inns, farmers entering into an agreement
to dismiss every laborer who attended a Methodist preacher, landlords
expelling all Methodists from their cottages, masters dismissing their
servants because they had joined the sect. The magistrates, who knew by
experience that the presence of a Methodist preacher was the usual
precursor of disturbance and riot, looked on them with the greatest
disfavor, and often scandalously connived at the persecutions they
underwent.
It was frequently observed by Wesley that his preaching rarely affected
the rich and the educated. It was over the ignorant and the credulous
that it exercised its most appalling power, and it is difficult to
overrate the mental anguish it must sometimes have produced. Timid and
desponding natures unable to convince themselves that they had undergone
a supernatural change, gentle and affectionate natures who believed that
those who were dearest to them were descending into everlasting fire,
must have often experienced pangs compared with which the torments of
the martyr were insignificant. The confident assertions of the Methodist
preacher and the ghastly images he continually evoked poisoned their
imaginations, haunted them in every hour of weakness or depression,
discolored all their judgments of the world, and added a tenfold horror
to the darkness of the grave. Sufferings of this description, though
among the most real and the most terrible that superstition can inflict,
are so hidden in their nature that they leave few traces in history; but
it is impossible to read the journals of Wesley without feeling that
they were most widely diffused. Many were thrown into paroxysms of
extreme, though usually transient, agony; many doubtless nursed a secret
sorrow which corroded all the happiness of their lives, while not a few
became literally insane. On one occasion Wesley was called to the
bedside of a young woman at Kingswood. He tells us:
She was nineteen or twenty years old, but, it seems, could not
write or read. I found her on the bed, two or three persons
holding her. It was a terrible sight. Anguish, horror, and
despair above all description appeared in her pale face. The
thousand distortions of her whole body showed how the dogs of
hell were gnawing at her heart. The shrieks intermixed were
scarce to be endured. But her stony eyes could not weep. She
screamed out as soon as words could find their way, "I am
damned, damned, lost forever: six days ago you might have
helped me. But it is past. I am the devil's now.... I will go
with him to hell. I cannot be saved." They sang a hymn, and for
a time she sank to rest, but soon broke out anew in incoherent
exclamations, "Break, break, poor stony hearts! Will you not
break? What more can be done for stony hearts? I am damned that
you may be saved!"... She then fixed her eyes in the corner of
the ceiling, and said, "There he is, ay, there he is! Come,
good devil, come! Take me away."... We interrupted her by
calling again on God, on which she sank down as before, and
another young woman began to roar out as loud as she had done.
For more than two hours Wesley and his brother continued praying over
her. At last the paroxysms subsided and the patient joined in a hymn of
praise.
In the intense religious enthusiasm that was generated, many of the ties
of life were snapped in twain. Children treated with contempt the
commands of their parents, students the rules of their colleges,
clergymen the discipline of their Church. The whole structure of
society, and almost all the amusements of life, appeared criminal. The
fairs, the mountebanks, the public rejoicings of the people, were all
Satanic. It was sinful for a woman to wear any gold ornament or any
brilliant dress. It was even sinful for a man to exercise the common
prudence of laying by a certain portion of his income. When Whitefield
proposed to a lady to marry him, he thought it necessary to say, "I
bless God, if I know anything of my own heart, I am free from that
foolish passion which the world calls love." "I trust I love you only
for God, and desire to be joined to you only by His commands, and for
His sake." It is perhaps not very surprising that Whitefield's marriage,
like that of Wesley, proved very unhappy. Theaters and the reading of
plays were absolutely condemned, and Methodists employed all their
influence with the authorities to prevent the erection of the former. It
seems to have been regarded as a divine judgment that once, when
Macbeth was being acted at Drury Lane, a real thunderstorm mingled
with the mimic thunder in the witch scene. Dancing was, if possible,
even worse than the theater. "Dancers," said Whitefield, "please the
devil at every step"; and it was said that his visit to a town usually
put "a stop to the dancing-school, the assemblies, and every pleasant
thing." He made it his mission to "bear testimony against the detestable
diversions of this generation"; and he declared that no "recreations,
considered as such, can be innocent."
Accompanying this asceticism we find an extraordinary revival of the
grossest superstition. It was a natural consequence of the essentially
emotional character of Methodism that its disciples should imagine that
every strong feeling or impulse within them was a direct inspiration of
God or Satan. The language of Whitefield—the language in a great degree
of all the members of the sect—was that of men who were at once
continually inspired and the continual objects of miraculous
interposition. In every perplexity they imagined that, by casting lots
or opening their Bibles at random, they could obtain a supernatural
answer to their inquiries.
In all matters relating to Satanic interference, Wesley was especially
credulous. "I cannot give up to all the Deists in Great Britain the
existence of witchcraft till I give up the credit of all history, sacred
and profane." He had no doubt that the physical contortions into which
so many of his hearers fell were due to the direct agency of Satan, who
tore the converts as they were coming to Christ. He had himself seen men
and women who were literally possessed by devils; he had witnessed forms
of madness which were not natural, but diabolical, and he had
experienced in his own person the hysterical affections which resulted
from supernatural agency.
If Satanic agencies continually convulsed those who were coming to the
faith, divine judgments as frequently struck down those who opposed it.
Every illness, every misfortune that befell an opponent, was believed to
be supernatural. Molther, the Moravian minister, shortly after the
Methodists had separated from the Moravians, was seized with a passing
illness. "I believe," wrote Wesley, "it was the hand of God that was
upon him." Numerous cases were cited of sudden and fearful judgments
which fell upon the adversaries of the cause. A clergyman at Bristol,
standing up to preach against the Methodists, "was suddenly seized with
a rattling in his throat, attended with a hideous groaning," and on the
next Sunday he died. At Todmorden a minister was struck with a violent
fit of palsy immediately after preaching against the Methodists. At
Enniscorthy a clergyman, having preached for some time against
Methodism, deferred the conclusion of the discourse to the following
Sunday. Next morning he was raging mad, imagined that devils were about
him, "and not long after, without showing the least sign of hope, he
went to his account." At Kingswood a man began a vehement invective
against Wesley and Methodism. "In the midst he was struck raving mad." A
woman, seeing a crowd waiting for Wesley at the church door, exclaimed,
"They are waiting for their God." She at once fell senseless to the
ground, and next day expired. "A party of young men rode up to Richmond
to disturb the sermons of Rowland Hill. The boat sank, and all of them
were drowned." At Sheffield the captain of a gang who had long troubled
the field-preachers, was bathing with his companions. "Another dip," he
said, "and then for a bit of sport with the Methodists." He dived,
struck his head against a stone, and appeared no more. By such anecdotes
and by such beliefs a fever of enthusiasm was sustained.
But with all its divisions and defects the movement was unquestionably
effecting a great moral revolution in England. It was essentially a
popular movement, exercising its deepest influence over the lower and
middle classes. Some of its leaders were men of real genius, but in
general the Methodist teacher had little sympathy with the more educated
of his fellow-countrymen. To an ordinarily cultivated mind there was
something extremely repulsive in his tears and groans and amorous
ejaculations, in the coarse and anthropomorphic familiarity and the
unwavering dogmatism with which he dealt with the most sacred subjects,
in the narrowness of his theory of life and his utter insensibility to
many of the influences that expand and embellish it, in the mingled
credulity and self-confidence with which he imagined that the whole
course of nature was altered for his convenience. But the very qualities
that impaired his influence in one sphere enhanced it in another. His
impassioned prayers and exhortations stirred the hearts of multitudes
whom a more decorous teaching had left absolutely callous. The
supernatural atmosphere of miracles, judgments, and inspirations in
which he moved, invested the most prosaic life with a halo of romance.
The doctrines he taught, the theory of life he enforced, proved
themselves capable of arousing in great masses of men an enthusiasm of
piety which was hardly surpassed in the first days of Christianity, of
eradicating inveterate vice, of fixing and directing impulsive and
tempestuous natures that were rapidly hastening toward the abyss. Out of
the profligate slave-dealer, John Newton, Methodism formed one of the
purest and most unselfish of saints. It taught criminals in Newgate to
mount the gallows in an ecstasy of rapturous devotion. It planted a
fervid and enduring religious sentiment in the midst of the most brutal
and most neglected portions of the population, and whatever may have
been its vices or its defects, it undoubtedly emancipated great numbers
from the fear of death, and imparted a warmer tone to the devotion and a
greater energy to the philanthropy of every denomination both in England
and the colonies.
The term collective behavior, which has been used elsewhere to include
all the facts of group life, has been limited for the purposes of this
chapter to those phenomena which exhibit in the most obvious and
elementary way the processes by which societies are disintegrated into
their constituent elements and the processes by which these elements are
brought together again into new relations to form new organizations and
new societies.
Some years ago John Graham Brooks wrote a popular treatise on the labor
situation in the United States. He called the volume Social Unrest.
The term was, even at that time, a familiar one. Since then the word
unrest, in both its substantive and adjective forms, has gained wide
usage. We speak in reference to the notorious disposition of the native
American to move from one part of the country to another, of his
restless blood, as if restlessness was a native American trait
transmitted in the blood. We speak more often of the "restless age," as
if mobility and the desire for novelty and new experience were
peculiarly characteristic of the twentieth century. We use the word to
describe conditions in different regions of social life in such
expressions as "political," "religious," and "labor" unrest, and in
every case the word is used in a sense that indicates change, but change
that menaces the existing order. Finally, we speak of the "restless
woman," as of a peculiar modern type, characteristic of the changed
status of women in general in the modern world. In all these different
uses we may observe the gradual unfolding of the concept which seems to
have been implicit in the word as it was first used. It is the concept
of an activity in response to some urgent organic impulse which the
activity, however, does not satisfy. It is a diagnostic symptom, a
symptom of what Graham Wallas calls "balked disposition." It is a sign
that in the existing situation some one or more of the four
wishes—security, new experience, recognition, and response—has not
been and is not adequately realized. The fact that the symptom is
social, that it is contagious, is an indication that the situations that
provoke it are social, that is to say, general in the community or the
group where the unrest manifests itself.[313] The materials in which
the term unrest is used in the sense indicated are in the popular
discussions of social questions. The term is not defined but it is
frequently used in connection with descriptions of conditions which are
evidently responsible for it. Labor strikes are evidences of social
unrest, and the literature already referred to in the chapter on
"Conflict"[1] shows the conditions under which unrest arises, is
provoked and exploited in labor situations. The relation of unrest to
routine and fatigue has been the subject of a good deal of discussion
and some investigation. The popular conception is that labor unrest is
due to the dull driving routine of machine industry. The matter needs
further study. The actual mental experiences of the different sexes,
ages, temperamental and mental types under the influence of routine
would add a much needed body of fact to our present psychology of the
worker.
If social unrest is a symptom of disorganization, then the psychic
epidemics, in which all the phenomena of social unrest and contagion are
intensified, is evidence positive that disorganization exists. Social
disorganization must be considered in relation to reorganization. All
change involves a certain amount of disorganization. In order that an
individual may make new adjustments and establish new habits it is
inevitable that old habits should be broken up, and in order that
society may reform an existing social order a certain amount of
disorganization is inevitable. Social unrest may be, therefore, a
symptom of health. It is only when the process of disorganization goes
on so rapidly and to such an extent that the whole existing social
structure is impaired, and society is, for that reason, not able to
readjust itself, that unrest is to be regarded as a pathological
symptom.
There is reason to believe, contrary to the popular conception, that the
immigrant in America, particularly in the urban environment,
accommodates himself too quickly rather than too slowly to American
life. Statistics show, particularly in the second generation, a notable
increase in juvenile delinquency, and this seems to be due to the fact
that in America the relation between parents and children is reversed.
Owing to the children's better knowledge of English and their more rapid
accommodation to the conditions of American life, parents become
dependent upon their children rather than the children dependent upon
their parents.
Social epidemics, however, are evidence of a social disintegration due
to more fundamental and widespread disorders. The literature has
recorded the facts but writers have usually interpreted the phenomena in
medical rather than sociological terms. Stoll, in his very interesting
but rather miscellaneous collection of materials upon primitive life,
disposes of the phenomena by giving them another name. His volume is
entitled Suggestion and Hypnotism in Folk Psychology.[314] Friedmann,
in his monograph, Über Wahnideen im Völkerleben, is disposed as a
psychiatrist to treat the whole matter as a form of "social" insanity.
In spite of the abundance of materials on the subject of mass movements
no attempt has been made as yet to collect and classify them. There have
been a number of interesting books in the field of collective
psychology, so called mainly by French and Italian writers—Sighele,
Rossi, Tarde, and Le Bon—but they are not based on a systematic study
of cases. The general assumption has been that the facts are so obvious
that any attempt to study systematically the mechanisms involved would
amount to little more than academic elaboration of what is already
obvious, a restatement in more abstract terms of what is already
familiar.
On the other hand, shepherds and cowboys, out of their experience in
handling cattle and sheep, have learned that the flock and the herd have
quite peculiar and characteristic modes of collective behavior which it
is necessary to know if one is to handle them successfully. At the same
time, practical politicians who make a profession of herding voters,
getting them out to the polls at the times they are needed and
determining for them, by the familiar campaign devices, the persons and
the issues for which they are to cast their ballots, have worked out
very definite methods for dealing with masses of people, so that they
are able to predict the outcome with considerable accuracy far in
advance of an election and make their dispositions accordingly.
Political manipulation of the movements and tendencies of popular
opinion has now reached a point of perfection where it can and will be
studied systematically. During the world-war it was studied, and all the
knowledge which advertisers, newspaper men, and psychologists possessed
was used to win the war.
Propaganda is now recognized as part of the grand strategy of war. Not
only political and diplomatic victories, but battles were won during the
world-war by the aid of this insidious weapon. The great victory of the
Austrian and German armies at Caporetto which in a few days wiped out
all the hard-won successes of the Italian armies was prepared by a
psychic attack on the morale of the troops at the front and a defeatist
campaign among the Italian population back of the lines.
In the battle of Caporetto the morale of the troops at the
front was undermined by sending postal cards and letters to
individual soldiers stating that their wives were in illicit
relations with officers and soldiers of the allies. Copies of
Roman and Milanese newspapers were forged and absolute
facsimiles of familiar journals were secretly distributed or
dropped from Austrian aeroplanes over the Italian lines. These
papers contained sensational articles telling the Italians that
Austria was in revolt, that Emperor Charles had been killed.
Accompanying these were other articles describing bread riots
throughout Italy and stating that the Italian government,
unable to quell them with its own forces, had sent British and
French re-enforcing troops and even Zulus into the cities, and
that these troops were shooting down women and children and
priests without mercy.
This attack upon the morale of the troops was followed by an
unforeseen assault upon a quiet sector, which succeeded in
piercing the line at numerous points. In the confusion that
followed the whole structure of the defense crumbled, and the
result was disastrous.
When the final history of the world-war comes to be written, one of its
most interesting chapters will be a description of the methods and
devices which were used by the armies on both sides to destroy the will
to war in the troops and among the peoples behind the lines. If the
application of modern science to war has multiplied the engines of
destruction, the increase of communication and the interpenetration of
peoples has given war among civilized peoples the character of an
internal and internecine struggle. Under these circumstances propaganda,
in the sense of an insidious exploitation of the sources of dissension
and unrest, may as completely change the character of wars of peoples as
they were once changed by the invention of gunpowder.
In this field there is room for investigation and study, for almost all
attempts thus far made to put advertising on a scientific basis have
been made by students of individual rather than social psychology.
For something more than a hundred years Europe has experienced a series
of linguistic and literary revivals, that is to say revivals of the folk
languages and the folk cultures. The folk languages are the speech of
peoples who have been conquered but not yet culturally absorbed by the
dominant language group. They are mostly isolated rural populations who
have remained to a large extent outside of the cosmopolitan cultures of
the cities. These people while not wholly illiterate have never had
enough education in the language of the dominant peoples of the cities
to enable them to use this alien speech as a medium of education. The
consequence is that, except for a relatively small group of
intellectuals, they have been cut off from the main current of European
life and culture. These linguistic revivals have not been confined to
any one nation, since every nation in Europe turns out upon analysis to
be a mosaic of minor nationalities and smaller cultural enclaves in
which the languages of little and forgotten peoples have been preserved.
Linguistic revivals have, in fact, been well-nigh universal. They have
taken place in France, Spain, Norway, Denmark, in most of the Balkan
States, including Albania, the most isolated of them all, and in all the
smaller nationalities along the Slavic-German border—Finland, Esthonia,
Letvia, Lithuania, Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Roumania, and the Ukraine.
Finally, among the Jews of Eastern Europe, there has been the Haskala
Movement, as the Jews of Eastern Europe call their period of
enlightenment, a movement that has quite unintentionally made the
Judeo-German dialect (Yiddish) a literary language.
At first blush, it seems strange that the revivals of the folk
speech should have come at a time when the locomotive and the
telegraph were extending commerce and communication to the
uttermost limits of the earth, when all barriers were breaking
down, and the steady expansion of cosmopolitan life and the
organization of the Great Society, as Graham Wallas has called
it, seemed destined to banish all the minor languages,
dialects, and obsolescent forms of speech, the last props of an
international provincialism, to the limbo of forgotten things.
The competition of the world-languages was already keen; all
the little and forgotten peoples of Europe—the Finns, Letts,
Ukrainians, Russo-Carpathians, Slovaks, Slovenians, Croatians,
the Catalonians of eastern Spain, whose language, by the way,
dates back to a period before the Roman Conquest, the Czechs,
and the Poles—began to set up presses and establish schools to
revive and perpetuate their several racial languages.
To those who, at this time, were looking forward to
world-organization and a universal peace through the medium of
a universal language, all this agitation had the appearance of
an anachronism, not to say a heresy. It seemed a deliberate
attempt to set up barriers, where progress demanded that they
should be torn down. The success of such a movement, it seemed,
must be to bring about a more complete isolation of the
peoples, to imprison them, so to speak, in their own languages,
and so cut them off from the general culture of Europe.[315]
The actual effect has been different from what was expected. It is
difficult, and for the masses of the people impossible, to learn through
the medium of a language that they do not speak. The results of the
efforts to cultivate Swedish and Russian in Finland, Polish and Russian
in Lithuania, Magyar in Slovakia and at the same time to prohibit the
publication of books and newspapers in the mother-tongue of the country
has been, in the first place, to create an artificial illiteracy and, in
the second, to create in the minds of native peoples a sense of social
and intellectual inferiority to the alien and dominant race.
The effect of the literary revival of the spoken language, however, has
been to create, in spite of the efforts to suppress it, a vernacular
press which opened the gates of western culture to great masses of
people for whom it did not previously exist. The result has been a great
cultural awakening, a genuine renaissance, which has had profound
reverberations on the political and social life of Europe.
The literary revival of the folk speech in Europe has
invariably been a prelude to the revival of the national spirit
in subject peoples. The sentiment of nationality has its roots
in memories that attach to the common possessions of the
people, the land, the religion, and the language, but
particularly the language.
Bohemian patriots have a saying, "As long as the language
lives, the nation is not dead." In an address in 1904 Jorgen
Levland, who was afterward Premier of Norway, in a plea for
"freedom with self-government, home, land, and our own
language," made this statement: "Political freedom is not the
deepest and greatest. Greater is it for a nation to preserve
her intellectual inheritance in her native tongue."
The revival of the national consciousness in the subject
peoples has invariably been connected with the struggle to
maintain a press in the native language. The reason is that it
was through the medium of the national press that the literary
and linguistic revivals took place. Conversely, the efforts to
suppress the rising national consciousness took the form of an
effort to censor or suppress the national press. There were
nowhere attempts to suppress the spoken language as such. On
the other hand, it was only as the spoken language succeeded in
becoming a medium of literary expression that it was possible
to preserve it under modern conditions and maintain in this way
the national solidarity. When the Lithuanians, for example,
were condemned to get their education and their culture through
the medium of a language not their own, the effect was to
denationalize the literate class and to make its members aliens
to their own people. If there was no national press, there
could be no national schools, and, indeed, no national church.
It was for this reason that the struggle to maintain the
national language and the national culture has always been a
struggle to maintain a national press.
European nationalists, seeking to revive among their peoples
the national consciousness, have invariably sought to restore
the national speech, to purge it of foreign idioms, and
emphasize every mark which serves to distinguish it from the
languages with which it tended to fuse.[316]
Investigation of these linguistic revivals and the nationalist movement
that has grown out of them indicates that there is a very intimate
relation between nationalist and religious movements. Both of them are
fundamentally cultural movements with incidental political consequences.
The movement which resulted in the reorganization of rural life in
Denmark, the movement that found expression in so unique an institution
as the rural high schools of Denmark, was begun by Bishop Grundtvig,
called the Luther of Denmark, and was at once a religious and a
nationalist movement. The rural high schools are for this reason not
like anything in the way of education with which people outside of
Denmark are familiar. They are not technical schools but cultural
institutions in the narrowest, or broadest, sense of that term.[317] The
teaching is "scientific," but at the same time "inspirational." They
are what a Sunday school might be if it were not held on Sunday and was
organized as Mr. H. G. Wells would organize it and with such a bible as
he would like to have someone write for us.[318]
The popular accounts which we have of religious revivals do not at first
suggest any very definite relations, either psychological or
sociological, between them and the literary revivals to which reference
has just been made. Religious revivals, particularly as described by
dispassionate observers, have the appearance of something bizarre,
fantastic, and wild, as indeed they often are.
What must strike the thoughtful observer, however, is the marked
similarity of these collective religious excitements, whether among
civilized or savage peoples and at places and periods remote in time and
in space. Frederick Morgan Davenport, who has collected and compared the
materials in this field from contemporary sources, calls attention in
the title of his volume, Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, to
this fundamental similarity of the phenomena. Whatever else the word
"primitive" may mean in this connection it does mean that the phenomena
of religious revivals are fundamentally human.
From the frantic and disheveled dances of the Bacchantes, following a
wine cart through an ancient Greek village, to the shouts and groans of
the mourners' bench of an old-time Methodist camp-meeting, religious
excitement has always stirred human nature more profoundly than any
other emotion except that of passionate love.
In the volume by Jean Pélissier, The Chief Makers of the National
Lithuanian Renaissance (Les Principaux artisans de la renaissance
nationale lituanienne), there is a paragraph describing the conversion
of a certain Dr. Kudirka, a Lithuanian patriot, to the cause of
Lithuanian nationality. It reads like a chapter from William James's
The Varieties of Religious Experience.[319]
It is materials like this that indicate how close and intimate are the
relations between cultural movements, whether religious or literary and
national, at least in their formal expression. The question that remains
to be answered is: In what ways do they differ?
A great deal has been written in recent times in regard to fashion. It
has been studied, for example, as an economic phenomenon. Sombart has
written a suggestive little monograph on the subject. It is in the
interest of machine industry that fashions should be standardized over a
wide area, and it is the function of advertising to achieve this result.
It is also of interest to commerce that fashions should change and this
also is largely, but not wholly, a matter of advertising. Tarde
distinguishes between custom and fashion as the two forms in which all
cultural traits are transmitted. "In periods when custom is in the
ascendant, men are more infatuated about their country than about their
time; for it is the past which is pre-eminently praised. In ages when
fashion rules, men are prouder, on the contrary, of their time than of
their country."[320]
The most acute analysis that has been made of fashion is contained in
the observation of Sumner in Folkways. Sumner pointed out that fashion
though differing from, is intimately related to, the mores. Fashion
fixes the attention of the community at a given time and place and by so
doing determines what is sometimes called the Spirit of the Age, the
Zeitgeist. By the introduction of new fashions the leaders of society
gain that distinction in the community by which they are able to
maintain their prestige and so maintain their position as leaders. But
in doing this, they too are influenced by the fashions which they
introduce. Eventually changes in fashion affect the mores.[321]
Fashion is related to reform and to revolution, because it is one of the
fundamental ways in which social changes take place and because, like
reform and revolution, it also is related to the mores.
Fashion is distinguished from reform by the fact that the changes it
introduces are wholly irrational if not at the same time wholly
unpredictable. Reform, on the other hand, is nothing if not rational. It
achieves its ends by agitation and discussion. Attempts have been made
to introduce fashions by agitation, but they have not succeeded. On the
other hand, reform is itself a fashion and has largely absorbed in
recent years the interest that was formerly bestowed on party politics.
There has been a great deal written about reforms but almost nothing
about reform. It is a definite type of collective behavior which has
come into existence and gained popularity under conditions of modern
life. The reformer and the agitator, likewise, are definite,
temperamental, and social types. Reform tends under modern conditions to
become a vocation and a profession like that of the politician. The
profession of the reformer, however, is social, as distinguished from
party politics.
Reform is not revolution. It does not seek to change the mores but
rather to change conditions in conformity with the mores. There have
been revolutionary reformers. Joseph II of Austria and Peter the Great
of Russia were reformers of that type. But revolutionary reforms have
usually failed. They failed lamentably in the case of Joseph II and
produced many very dubious results under Peter.
A revolution is a mass movement which seeks to change the mores by
destroying the existing social order. Great and silent revolutionary
changes have frequently taken place in modern times, but as these
changes were not recognized at the time and were not directly sought by
any party they are not usually called revolutions. They might properly
be called "historical revolutions," since they are not recognized as
revolutions until they are history.
There is probably a definite revolutionary process but it has not been
defined. Le Bon's book on the Psychology of Revolution, which is the
sequel to his study of The Crowd, is, to be sure, an attempt, but the
best that one can say of it is that it is suggestive. Many attempts have
been made to describe the processes of revolution as part of the whole
historical process. This literature will be considered in the chapter on
"Progress."
(1) Cooley, Charles H. Social Organization. Chap. xxx, "Formalism and
Disorganization," pp. 342-55; chap. xxxi, "Disorganization: the Family,"
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1909.
(2) Thomas, W. I., and Znaniecki, Florian. The Polish Peasant in Europe
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and Reorganization in Poland," Boston, 1920.
(3) ——. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Vol. V,
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(4) Friedländer, L. Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire.
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Sittengeschichte Roms. 4 vols. London, 1908-13.
(5) Lane-Poole, S. The Mohammedan Dynasties. Charts showing "Growth of
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(6) Taine, H. The Ancient Régime. Translated from the French by John
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(7) Wells, H. G. Russia in the Shadows. New York, 1921.
(8) Patrick, George T. W. The Psychology of Social Reconstruction.
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(9) Ferrero, Guglielmo. "The Crisis of Western Civilization," Atlantic
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(1) Brooks, John Graham. The Social Unrest. Studies in labor and
socialist movements. London, 1903.
(2) Fuller, Bampfylde. Life and Human Nature. Chap. ii, "Change," pp.
24-45. London, 1914.
(3) Wallas, Graham. The Great Society. A psychological analysis. Chap.
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(4) Healy, William. The Individual Delinquent. A textbook of diagnosis
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Constitutional Excitement," pp. 609-13. Boston, 1915.
(5) Janet, Pierre. The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. Fifteen lectures
given in the medical school of Harvard University. New York, 1907.
(6) Barr, Martin W., and Maloney, E. F. Types of Mental Defectives.
"Idiot Savant," pp. 128-35. Philadelphia, 1920.
(7) Thomas, Edward. Industry, Emotion and Unrest. New York, 1920.
(8) Parker, Carleton H. The Casual Laborer and Other Essays. Chap. i,
"Toward Understanding Labor Unrest," pp. 27-59. New York, 1920.
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The Morning Post (of London). New York, 1920.
(10) Ferrero, Guglielmo. Ancient Rome and Modern America. A
comparative study of morals and manners. New York, 1914.
(11) Veblen, Thorstein. "The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness
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(12) Lippmann, Walter. "Unrest," New Republic, XX (1919), 315-22.
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(14) Baker, Ray Stannard. The New Industrial Unrest. Its reason and
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(15) MacCurdy, J. T. "Psychological Aspects of the Present Unrest,"
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(16) Myers, Charles S. Mind and Work. The psychological factors in
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(19) Münsterberg, Hugo. Social Studies of Today. Chap. ii, "The
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(20) ——. American Problems. From the point of view of a
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(22) Ferrero, Guglielmo. The Women of the Caesars. New York, 1911.
(23) Myerson, Abraham. The Nervous Housewife. Boston, 1920.
(24) Mensch, Ella. Bilderstürmer in der Berliner Frauenbewegung. 2d
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1. Collective Behavior and Social Control
2. Unrest in the Person and Unrest in the Group
3. The Agitator as a Type of the Restless Person
4. A Study of Adolescent Unrest: the Runaway Boy and the Girl Who Goes
Wrong
5. A Comparison of Physical Epidemics with Social Contagion
6. Case Studies of Psychic Epidemics: the Mississippi Bubble, Gold
Fever, War-Time Psychosis, the Dancing Mania in Modern Times, etc.
7. Propaganda as Social Contagion: an Analysis of a Selected Case
8. A Description and Interpretation of Crowd Behavior: the Orgy, the
Cult, the Mob, the Organized Crowd
9. The "Animal" Crowd: the Flock, the Herd, the Pack
10. A Description of Crowd Behavior on Armistice Day
11. The Criminal Crowd
12. The Jury, the Congenial Group, the Committee, the Legislature, the
Mass Meeting, etc., as Types of Collective Behavior
13. Crowd Excitements and Mass Movements
14. A Study of Mass Migrations: the Barbarian Invasions, the Settlement
of Oklahoma, the Migrations of the Mennonnites, the Treks of the Boers,
the Rise of Mohammedanism, the Mormon Migrations, etc.
15. Crusades and Reforms: the Crusades, the Abolition Movement,
Prohibition, the Woman's Temperance Crusades, Moving-Picture Censorship,
etc.
16. Fashions, Revivals, and Revolutions
17. The Social Laws of Fashions
18. Linguistic Revivals and the Nationalist Movements
19. Religious Revivals and the Origin of Sects
20. Social Unrest, Social Movements, and Changes in Mores and
Institutions
1. What do you understand by collective behavior?
2. Interpret the incident in a Lancashire cotton factory in terms of
sympathy, imitation, and suggestion.
3. What simple forms of social contagion have you observed?
4. In what sense may the dancing mania of the Middle Ages be compared to
an epidemic?
5. Why may propaganda be interpreted as social contagion? Describe a
concrete instance of propaganda and analyze its modus operandi.
6. What are the differences in behavior of the flock, the pack, and the
herd?
7. Is it accurate to speak of these animal groups as "crowds"?
8. What do you understand Le Bon to mean by "the mental unity of
crowds"?
9. Describe and analyze the behavior of crowds which you have observed.
10. "The crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated
individual." "The crowd may be better or worse than the individual." Are
these statements consistent? Elaborate your position.
11. In what sense may we speak of sects, castes, and classes as crowds?
12. What do you mean by a social movement?
13. What is the significance of a movement?
14. Why is movement to be regarded as the fundamental form of freedom?
15. How does crowd excitement lead to mass movements?
16. What were the differences in the characteristics of mass movements
in the Klondike Rush, the Woman's Crusade, Methodism, and bolshevism?
17. What are the causes of social unrest?
18. What is the relation of social unrest to social organization?
19. How does Le Bon explain the mental anarchy at the time of the French
Revolution?
20. What was the nature of this mental anarchy in the different social
classes? Are revolutions always preceded by mental anarchy?
21. What was the relative importance of belief and of reason in the
French Revolution?
22. What are the likenesses and differences between the origin and
development of bolshevism and of the French Revolution?
23. Do you agree with Spargo's interpretation of the psychology (a) of
the intellectual Bolshevists, and (b) of the I.W.W.?
24. Are mass movements organizing or disorganizing factors in society?
Illustrate by reference to Methodism, the French Revolution, and
bolshevism.
25. Under what conditions will a mass movement (a) become organized,
and (b) become an institution?