260 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



of work to an expert in another or in none ; our ingrainedly 

 English practice of removing the shoemaker from his last. 

 However imperiously theory would urge us to condemn our 

 muddled, out-at-elbows methods, yet the national genius for 

 " getting through " in the most unlikely, impossible circum- 

 stances does give a. sort of " pragmatic sanction " to our 

 cherished whim for using the wrong tool wherever we can ; 

 and because we do thus succeed at last, we are deluded into 

 overlooking its essential flaw. The worst that can be said of 

 this, our peculiarly national form of incompetence, is not that 

 it fails, but that it succeeds with horrible waste of material, 

 with criminal sacrifice of our ablest and our best ; succeeds 

 indeed at the price of destroying just those things and those 

 persons whose existence the country, could it learn what 

 " belonged to its peace," would recognise as being really vital, 

 absolutely indispensable. A worse worst need hardly be 

 sought or desired. 



CROWDOLOGY, by Joshua C. Gregory, B.Sc, F.I.C. : on The Crowd in 

 Peace and War, by Sir Martin Conway. [Pp. 332.] (Longmans, 

 Green & Co., 19 15. Price 6s. net.) 



In these days thought has taken all knowledge for its province, 

 deprives few things of their share of attention, and is quite 

 ready with a generous meed of criticism for all. Writers have 

 jeered at crowds throughout history and studied their foibles, 

 when they condescended to study the crowd at all, to make 

 sport of them, to mock at them, or to play upon them. Sir 

 Martin Conway's The Crowd in Peace and War is a recent 

 addition to a rapid series of studies of the " crowd " to which 

 science is now seriously turning its attention. It is, perhaps, 

 impossible to consider the crowd with the same dispassionate, 

 detached regard that science bestows upon the atom. Atoms 

 have no votes and obey their own laws without trying to 

 make us conform to them. Sir Martin, like Le Bon and 

 others, has certainly not attained to a purely contemplative 

 or coldly scientific view of his subject. He might have been 

 less racy if he had. Perhaps crowds which, if not of emotion 

 all compact as Sir Martin would have us believe, tend dis- 

 tinctly to the emotional cannot be adequately studied in a 

 purely contemplative spirit. Emotion needs an answering 



