ng syrup to
its soporific members than about wakening the dead. The spectacle of
bishops denouncing Prohibition in the name of Freedom; of
representative Church Councils refusing to recommend the cause of
No-Licence; of congregations being narcotised to the slaughter of the
innocents that goes on ceaselessly all around them--the victims of
Bacchus laid for ever on his altar--while the preacher proclaims peace,
peace, where there is no peace, and expounds an evangel of sweetness
and light while the people are perishing--all that may well make angels
weep. But the Churches are wakening. The founder of Christianity
prayed, 'Lead us not into temptation,' and Christians cannot for ever
acquiesce in the State tempting its own children to their destruction.
Just as we look back and marvel how any Christian could ever defend
slavery, so fifty years hence, when the liquor traffic will have become
a memory, men will marvel how Christians could ever have defended the
Liquor Trade and looked on, silent, while it swept the young and the
strong to doom.

CHAPTER VI

THE PERIL OF THE CROWD

The history of humanity is in large measure the history of its own
illusions. It has always been towards the mirage that men have tramped
with bleeding feet, only to strew the desert with bleached bones. One
great illusion has been that the golden age would come when the world's
autocracies gave place at last to democracy, and the will of the
multitude became law. It has come; democracy now wields the world's
sceptre. But alas! the golden age tarries, and the wistful doubt
arises whether the greatest peril confronting humanity may not be just
that--the sceptre in the hand of the unregenerate crowd.

I

For what we have to remember is that the crowd is by its very nature
and spirit capable of crimes such as the individual autocrat would
shrink from in horror. You may think that fantastic, and imagine that
a crowd consists, after all, of so many individuals, and that the
spirit of the crowd can only be the aggregate of the individuals
comprising it. But such a view is mistaken. The corporate spirit of
the crowd is not that of the units composing it. The best illustration
of this is the sudden reeling back into the jungle of a crowd when a
panic seizes them. Let the cry 'Fire' be raised in a crowded building,
and though the separate individuals be of the gentlest and most
considerate, yet instantly the crowd becomes daemonic