A crowd is not merely impulsive and mobile.Like a savage, it is not prepared to admit that anything can come between its desire and the realisation of its desire.It is the less capable of understanding such an intervention, in consequence of the feeling of irresistible power given it by its numerical strength.The notion of impossibility disappears for the individual in a crowd.
An isolated individual knows well enough that alone he cannot set fire to a palace or loot a shop, and should he be tempted to do so, he will easily resist the temptation.Making part of a crowd, he is conscious of the power given him by number, and it is sufficient to suggest to him ideas of murder or pillage for him to yield immediately to temptation.An unexpected obstacle will be destroyed with frenzied rage.Did the human organism allow of the perpetuity of furious passion, it might be said that the normal condition of a crowd baulked in its wishes is just such a state of furious passion.
The fundamental characteristics of the race, which constitute the unvarying source from which all our sentiments spring, always exert an influence on the irritability of crowds, their impulsiveness and their mobility, as on all the popular sentiments we shall have to study.All crowds are doubtless always irritable and impulsive, but with great variations of degree.For instance, the difference between a Latin and an Anglo-Saxon crowd is striking.The most recent facts in French history throw a vivid light on this point.The mere publication, twenty-five years ago, of a telegram, relating an insult supposed to have been offered an ambassador, was sufficient to determine an explosion of fury, whence followed immediately a terrible war.
Some years later the telegraphic announcement of an insignificant reverse at Langson provoked a fresh explosion which brought about the instantaneous overthrow of the government.At the same moment a much more serious reverse undergone by the English expedition to Khartoum produced only a slight emotion in England, and no ministry was overturned.Crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics, but Latin crowds are the most feminine of all.Whoever trusts in them may rapidly attain a lofty destiny, but to do so is to be perpetually skirting the brink of a Tarpeian rock, with the certainty of one day being precipitated from it.
2.THE SUGGESTIBILITY AND CREDULITY OF CROWDS.
When defining crowds, we said that one of their general characteristics was an excessive suggestibility, and we have shown to what an extent suggestions are contagious in every human agglomeration; a fact which explains the rapid turning of the sentiments of a crowd in a definite direction.However indifferent it may be supposed, a crowd, as a rule, is in a state of expectant attention, which renders suggestion easy.The first suggestion formulated which arises implants itself immediately by a process of contagion in the brains of all assembled, and the identical bent of the sentiments of the crowd is immediately an accomplished fact.
As is the case with all persons under the influence of suggestion, the idea which has entered the brain tends to transform itself into an act.Whether the act is that of setting fire to a palace, or involves self-sacrifice, a crowd lends itself to it with equal facility.All will depend on the nature of the exciting cause, and no longer, as in the case of the isolated individual, on the relations existing between the act suggested and the sum total of the reasons which may be urged against its realisation.
In consequence, a crowd perpetually hovering on the borderland of unconsciousness, readily yielding to all suggestions, having all the violence of feeling peculiar to beings who cannot appeal to the influence of reason, deprived of all critical faculty, cannot be otherwise than excessively credulous.The improbable does not exist for a crowd, and it is necessary to bear this circumstance well in mind to understand the facility with which are created and propagated the most improbable legends and stories.[3]
[3] Persons who went through the siege of Paris saw numerous examples of this credulity of crowds.A candle alight in an upper story was immediately looked upon as a signal given the besiegers, although it was evident, after a moment of reflection, that it was utterly impossible to catch sight of the light of the candle at a distance of several miles.
The creation of the legends which so easily obtain circulation in crowds is not solely the consequence of their extreme credulity.
It is also the result of the prodigious perversions that events undergo in the imagination of a throng.The simplest event that comes under the observation of a crowd is soon totally transformed.A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself immediately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first.We can easily conceive this state by thinking of the fantastic succession of ideas to which we are sometimes led by calling up in our minds any fact.Our reason shows us the incoherence there is in these images, but a crowd is almost blind to this truth, and confuses with the real event what the deforming action of its imagination has superimposed thereon.
A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective.It accepts as real the images evoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact.
The ways in which a crowd perverts any event of which it is a witness ought, it would seem, to be innumerable and unlike each other, since the individuals composing the gathering are of very different temperaments.But this is not the case.As the result of contagion the perversions are of the same kind, and take the same shape in the case of all the assembled individuals.
