452 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



among wliicli one is the active ferment, has infected it with his 

 intense and perverted enthusiasm. As every shop has its director, 

 every convent its superior, every brigade its general, every as- 

 sembly its president, every fraction of an assembly its leader, so 

 every lively saloon has its Coryphgeus of conversation, every riot 

 its chief, every court its king, prince, or princelet. If a theater 

 audience can ever properly be regarded as constituting to a cer- 

 tain extent an association, it is when it applauds, because it fol- 

 lows, in clapping, the impulse of an initial applause ; and when 

 it is listening, because it yields to the suggestion of the author 

 as expressed by the mouth of the actor who is speaking. Every- 

 where, then, whether visible or not, there reigns here the distinc- 

 tion between leader and led, so important in fixing responsibility. 

 This is not saying that the wills of all are annihilated in the pres- 

 ence of the will of one ; this, too, suggested, the echo of external 

 or anterior voices of which it is only the original condensation 

 is obliged, in order to impose itself on the others, to make them 

 concessions, and to flatter them in order to lead them. Thus it is 

 with the orator, who has to take care not to neglect oratorical 

 precautions ; with the dramatic speaker, who has constantly to 

 bend to the prejudices and changing tastes of his audiences ; and 

 with the leader who would manage his party. 



Yet the conditions are various according as spontaneous or 

 organized assemblies are in question. In the latter a will to be 

 dominant must arise conformed, in a certain degree, to the tend- 

 encies and traditions of the prevailing wills ; but once arisen, 

 it executes itself with a fidelitj^ the more perfect the wiser the 

 organization of the body. In mobs an imperative will does not 

 have to conform itself to traditions that do not exist, and may 

 even get itself obeyed, notwithstanding its weak agreement with 

 the tendencies of the majority ; but, whether conformed or not, it 

 is always imperfectly executed, and suffers changes in imposing 

 itself. We can affirm that all the forms of human association are 

 distinguished, first, by the way in which one thought or will 

 among a thousand becomes the director of them under conditions 

 of conflict of thoughts and wills from which it comes out vic- 

 torious ; second, by the greater or less facility which is offered in 

 them for the propagation of the directing thought or will. 



The objection has been made, with some force,* that the part 



* A Russian economist made this objection at the Congress of Criminal Anthropology 

 in Brussels, in August, 1892, citing agrarian risings in his country caused by the famine. 

 More recently an Italian author, from whom we shall quote shortly, has made similar ob- 

 jections. On the other hand, I have learned, while correcting the proofs of this article, 

 that the thesis developed in it has been previously set forth by a distinguished Russian 

 writer, M. Mikhailowsky, in 1882, in a publication entitled Otechestwannia Zapiskl. 



