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feeling to apprehend it and, most of all, to interpret it. Also, 

 Sir Martin may not be merely prolonging the jeering tradi- 

 tion even when he, gradually widening his denial, refuses to 

 the crowd any intellectual capacity whatever. He honestly 

 thinks, no doubt, that his opinion is scientifically impartial. 

 Besides, the crowd will presumably have faults if it is com- 

 posed of imperfect individuals — it offers plenty of scope for 

 criticism, a scope that Sir Martin does not fail to appreciate. 

 He makes handsome amends, however ; if he does say hard 

 things, he also adds that the crowd has secured the elevation 

 of the mass of mankind from the level of the brutes. He thus 

 moves farther away from the classical and contemptuous 

 attitude than does Le Bon when the latter suggests that the 

 present rule of the crowd is a barbaric phase about to destroy 

 civilisation. In any case it is well that the crowd should 

 receive systematic and careful study, for only in this way can 

 we hope, in conjunction with other knowledge, to acquire the 

 more perfect understanding so necessary for our guidance 

 in dealing with the complications of modern societies. 



The term " crowd " is now used to denote a group of 

 individuals connected by some common interest or interests. 

 It includes both aggregates of people gathered together (crowds 

 in the usual sense) and dispersed groups. The audience at a 

 meeting is a crowd, and so, in the second sense, are the habitual 

 readers of a newspaper. The latter are, and may always 

 remain, dispersed, but they constitute a crowd because of 

 their common interest. The comprehensiveness of this defini- 

 tion, though justified, must be kept closely in mind if errors 

 are to be avoided. As a matter of fact, students of the crowd 

 do forget this comprehensiveness and do fall into considerable 

 errors. The link of interest that connects individuals into 

 crowds may be almost anything whatever. Music, science, 

 rat-catching, dining, sport of any kind, political principles 

 in their diversities, religion, philanthropy, even burglary may 

 be the common animating interest that unites aggregates or 

 dispersals of men and women into crowds. Obviously these 

 different crowds will vary enormously, according to the nature 

 of their constitutive principle. The Royal Society is a crowd 

 very different from the multitude assembled at a football 

 match. Now the word " crowd " naturally suggests to us, in 

 the first place, an assembly rather than a dispersed group, 



