HUMAN AGGREGATION AND CRIME. 449 



liaments have been the panaceas demanded "by suffering multi- 

 tudes. The superstition of the jury is the offspring of a similar 

 error, always mistaken and constantly reviving. In reality these 

 bodies were never simple meetings of persons, but rather cor- 

 porations like certain great religious orders or certain great civil 

 or religious organizations, that have at times responded to the 

 wants of the people. Still it should be observed that, even under 

 their corporative form, collective bodies have shown themselves 

 impotent to create anew. This is* the case, however smoothly 

 working may be the mechanism in which they are adjusted and 

 geared. For how is it possible to match in simultaneous compli- 

 cation and elasticity the structure of that cerebral organism which 

 every one of us bears in his head ? 



As long, therefore, as a well-organized brain excels the best- 

 constituted parliament in rapid and sure performance, in the 

 prompt absorption and elaboration of multiple elements, and in 

 the intimate solidarity of innumerable agents, it will be puerile, 

 however plausible it may seem a priori, to count on mass meetings 

 or on deliberative bodies, rather than on one man, to deliver a 

 country from a difficult situation. In fact, every time a nation 

 passes through one of those periods when it has an imperious need 

 of great mental capacity as well as of great heart movements, the 

 necessity imposes itself of a personal government, whether under 

 the form of a republic or of a monarchy, or under color of a par- 

 liament. 



The preceding considerations may be of use in determining 

 wherein lies the responsibility of leaders for acts committed by 

 the groups which they direct. An assembly or association, a mob 

 or a sect, has no other thought than the one that inspires it ; and 

 it matters not that this thought, this more or less intelligent indi- 

 cation of an end to be pursued or of a means to be employed, is 

 propagated from the brain of one to the brains of all it con- 

 tinues the same. The one who inspired it is therefore responsible 

 for its direct effects. But the emotion associated with this idea, 

 and which is propagated along with it, does not continue the 

 same as it spreads, but is intensified in a sort of mathematical 

 progression ; and what may have been a moderate desire or a halt- 

 ing opinion with the instigator with the first whisperer of a 

 suspicion, for example, ventured against a category of citizens 

 promptly becomes passion and conviction, hatred and fanaticism 

 in the fermentable mass into which the germ has fallen. The in- 

 tensity of emotion that moves the throng and carries it to excess, 

 in the good or evil it does, is therefore largely its own work, the 

 effect of the mutual warming up of those souls in contact by their 

 mutual reflection ; and it would be as unjust to impute to any 

 one director all the crimes to which this over-excitement may 



VOL. XLV. 35 



