HUMAN AGGREGATION AND CRIME. 455 



false, striking the senses and not the mind, and the most intense 

 emotions are the most egotistical. This is why it is easier in a 

 mob to propagate a puerile fancy than an abstract truth, a com- 

 parison than a reason, faith in a man or suspicion of him than 

 attachment to a principle or renunciation of a prejudice ; and 

 why the pleasure of vilifying being more lively than the pleasure 

 of admiring, and the sentiment of preservation stronger than that 

 of duty, hootings are more easily started than bravoes, and spasms 

 of panic are more frequent than impulses of courage. 



It has been remarked * that mobs are generally inferior in intel- 

 ligence and morality to the average of their members. Not only 

 is the social compound in this case, as it always is, dissimilar to 

 the elements of which it is the product or combination rather than 

 the sum, but it is also habitually worthless. This is true, however, 

 only of mobs and aggregations that resemble them. But where 

 the spirit of the organization (esprit de corps) rather than the 

 spirit of the mob prevails, it usually happens that the composite, 

 in which the genius of a grand organizer survives, is superior to 

 its existing elements. Accordingly, as a company of actors is a 

 corporation or a mob that is, as it is more or less trained and or- 

 ganized its members will play together better or worse than when 

 separately they speak monologues. In a highly disciplined body, 

 like the police, excellent rules for hunting criminals, hearing wit- 

 nesses, and drawing up processes are transmitted traditionally, 

 and fortify the mind of the individual in its reliance on a higher 

 reason. While we can say with truth, adopting a Latin proverb, 

 that senators are good men and the senate is an unruly beast, I 

 have had a hundred occasions to remark that the gendarmes, 

 though generally intelligent, are less so than the gendarmerie. A 

 general made the same remark to me while drilling his recruits. 

 Questioned separately concerning military maneuvers, he found 

 them all stupid ; but when they were brought together he was 

 surprised to see them perform with a harmony and spirit, with an 

 air of collective intelligence, very superior to what they had shown 

 singly. The regiment, therefore, is often braver, more generous, 

 and more moral than the soldier. Doubtless, corporations, whether 

 regiments, religious orders, or sects, go further than mobs both in 

 mischief and in well-doing ; from the best disposed mobs to the 

 most criminal is a less distance than from the noblest exploits of 

 our armies to the worst excesses of Jacobinism, or from the Sis- 

 ters of St. Vincent de Paul to the Camorrists and the anarchists ; 

 and M. Taine, who has depicted with much vigor criminal mobs 

 and criminal sects, has shown that the latter were more mis- 



* See, on this subject, a very interesting essay by M. Sighele, on La Folia delinquente, 

 which has been reviewed by M. Cherbuliez in the Kevue des Deux Mondes. 



