ay venture to state with some confidence
that both the sociologists and the reactionaries are wrong.
It does not follow that human beings become less than human because their
ideas appeal to more and more of humanity. Nor can we deduce that men
are mindless solely from the fact that they are all of one mind.
In plain fact the virtues of a mob cannot be found in a herd
of bulls or a pack of wolves, any more than the crimes of a mob
can be committed by a flock of sheep or a shoal of herrings.
Birds have never been known to besiege and capture an empty cage
of an aviary, on a point of principle, merely because it had kept a few
other birds in captivity, as the mob besieged and captured the almost
empty Bastille, merely because it was the fortress of a historic tyranny.
And rats have never been known to die by thousands merely in order
to visit a particular trap in which a particular rat had perished,
as the poor peasants of the First Crusade died in thousands for a
far-off sight of the Sepulchre or a fragment of the true cross.
In this sense indeed the Crusade was not rationalistic, if the rat
is the only rationalist. But it will seem more truly rational
to point out that the inspiration of such a crowd is not in such
instincts as we share with the animals, but precisely in such ideas
as the animals never (with all their virtues) understand.

What is peculiar about the First Crusade is that it was in quite
a new and abnormal sense a popular movement. I might almost say
it was the only popular movement there ever was in the world.
For it was not a thing which the populace followed; it was actually
a thing which the populace led. It was not only essentially
a revolution, but it was the only revolution I know of in which
the masses began by acting alone, and practically without any
support from any of the classes. When they had acted, the classes
came in; and it is perfectly true, and indeed only natural,
that the masses alone failed where the two together succeeded.
But it was the uneducated who educated the educated.
The case of the Crusade is emphatically not a case in which certain
ideas were first suggested by a few philosophers, and then preached
by demagogues to the democracy. This was to a great extent true
of the French Revolution; it was probably yet more true of the
Russian Revolution; and we need not here pause upon the fine shade
of difference that Rousseau was right and Karl Marx was wrong.
In the First