456 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cMevous than the former. But while mobs more frequently do 

 ill than good, corporations more frequently do good than ill. 



When, by chance, a multitude in action appears to be better, 

 more heroic, and more magnanimous than the average of those 

 who compose it, the fact is either due to extraordinary circum- 

 stances, or the magnanimity is only apparent and fictitious, and is 

 the deep-seated result of a hidden terror. The heroism of fear is 

 frequent in mobs. Sometimes the beneficent conduct of a mob is 

 simply a survival of the custom of an ancient corporation. Is not 

 this the case in the spontaneous self-devotion which is sometimes 

 exhibited in the crowds which in cities run to put out a great fire ? 

 I say sometimes of them, not referring to the body of the firemen, 

 in whom these admirable traits are habitual and exhibited daily. 

 The multitude around these, following their example, perhaps 

 stimulated by emulation, show also a rare devotion, and confront 

 a danger to save a life. But when we observe that these collec- 

 tions of the multitude are a traditional affair, that they have their 

 rules and customs, that they portion out duties, that the full 

 buckets go round on the right and the empty ones on the left, 

 that their actions are combined with a customary act rather than 

 being spontaneous, we are brought to perceive that these mani- 

 festations of sympathy and of fraternal assistance have come 

 down from the peculiar corporative life of the communities of the 

 middle ages. 



Instances in any number might be cited to illustrate how an 

 excited multitude, even when the majority of it are persons of 

 intelligence, has always something in it partaking both of the 

 puerile and the bestial : of the puerile in the mobility of its hu- 

 mor, in its quick passage from rage to outbursts of laughter ; of 

 the bestial in its brutality. It is cowardly, too, even when com- 

 posed of individuals of average courage. It is hard to conceive 

 to what extent mobs, and unorganized, undisciplined collections 

 of men in general, are more mobile, more forgetful, more credu- 

 lous, and more cruel than the greater part of their elements ; but 

 the proofs of the fact are abundant. In the collective mind 

 images succeed one another incoherently, as they do in the brain 

 of a sleeping or a hypnotized man ; while most of the indi- 

 vidual minds which compose it, and which concur in forming 

 that great folly called opinion, are capable of consecutiveness 

 and order in the arrangement of their ideas. M. Delboeuf tells 

 of a poor German, just arrived at Lidge, who followed the crowd 

 to the scene of a dynamite explosion. Some one, seeing him run 

 a little faster than tlie others, pointed him out as the guilty per- 

 son, and the whole mob was ready to cut him to pieces. Yet that 

 mob was composed of the best society of the place, attending a 

 concert; and gentlemen could be heard calling for a revolver 



