450 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



carry it, as to attribute to Mm the whole merit of the great deeds 

 of patriotic exaltation and of the great acts of devotion excited 

 by the same fever. We may, therefore, always hold the chiefs of 

 a band or a riot accountable for the astuteness and dexterity it 

 displays in the execution of its maneuvers, robberies, and acts of 

 incendiarism, but not always for the violence and extent of the 

 evils caused by its criminal contagions. The general alone is en- 

 titled to credit for the plan of the campaign, but not for the 

 bravery of his soldiers. I do not say that this distinction is ade- 

 quate to simplify all the problems of responsibility raised by our 

 subject, but it will be well to regard it in trying to solve them. 



From the intellectual as well as from other points of view, 

 considerable differences may be established between the various 

 forms of social groups. We do not include those which consist 

 in a simple material bringing together of people. Passers in a 

 thronged street, travelers meeting or thrown together on a packet 

 boat, in a railway carriage, or around a dinner table, silent or 

 without general conversation with one another, are grouped 

 physically, not socially. As much may be said of countrymen 

 congregated at a fair, as long as they do nothing but trade with 

 one another, seeking each his own objects, even though they be 

 alike, without co-operation in any common act. All that can be 

 said of this sort of folk is that they bear in themselves the poten- 

 tiality of a social group, so far as resemblances of language, 

 nationality, religion, class, or education may dispose them to as- 

 sociate more or less closely, if occasion should require. Should 

 an explosion of dynamite take place in the street, the vessel be in 

 danger of foundering, the train run off from the track, a fire 

 break out in the hotel, or a rumor about some forestaller spread 

 through the market, the associable individuals would at once be- 

 come associates in the pursuit of an identical purpose under the 

 dominion of an identical emotion. 



Thus may arise spontaneously the first stage of the association 

 which we call the mob. By a series of intermediate steps there 

 is raised from this rudimentary, fugacious, and amorphous ag- 

 gregation, the organized, chief-led, persistent, and regular mob, 

 which may be called the corporation, in the widest sense of the 

 word. The most intense expression of the religious corporation 

 is the monastery; of the lay corporation, the regiment or the 

 workshop. The widest expression of the two is the church or the 

 state. It may indeed be remarked that churches and states, re- 

 ligions and nations, are always tending, in their period of robust 

 growth, to realize the corporative type, monastic or regimental, 

 without, fortunately, ever quite reaching it. Their historical life 

 is passed in oscillating from one type to the other ; in giving the 

 impression by turns of a great mob, like the Barbary States, or of 



