, a wrestling,
writhing, struggling mass trampling the weak under foot, with no
thought but self-preservation.

There are various explanations. One is the law of sympathy, by which
an emotion is intensified in being shared. At the first cry of peril a
wave of fear passes through the crowd; and as each looks at the faces
around him he sees fear in every eye. The emotion suddenly unloosed is
like a river whose source is amid the silent hills, that gathers in its
course a thousand rills, until at last it sweeps in mighty floods
everything before it. Before the flood of terror generated by the
crowd all the decencies of civilisation vanish, and man becomes once
more the animal with but the one instinct--to fight for one's life.
And it is the same with anger. Let a skilled orator set himself to
rouse the passion of a crowd, and he will soon generate a spirit that
utterly obliterates the individual. Let him depict the wrongs they
suffer, and anger sweeps through the multitude, bending them to the
spirit of the orator as the corn field bends before the wind. Though
as individuals they may tremble in their shoes before their wives, now,
fused by rhetoric into one glowing mass, they are ready to loot a city,
pull down a Bastille, and level an absolutist throne with the dust.
But the great explanation of the spirit of the crowd as distinct from
the individual is that in the surge of contagious emotion generated by
the crowd the sense of personal identity is lost. Each only lives in
the crowd. And with the loss of identity comes the loss of personal
responsibility. I no longer stand alone to be judged for my acts; it
is the crowd who will be judged. The brake of personal responsibility
suddenly snaps. It is thus that a crowd will commit a crime that the
individual afterwards remembers with horror. Only a crowd could have
said: 'His blood be on us and on our children.'

In these last years the horrors that struck a chill into the heart of
the world were committed by the crowd. Suddenly in a Belgian village
the cry was raised, 'We are being sniped.' Instantly the soldiers were
swept by one emotion, and there rose the cry for vengeance. Then the
Mayor and the priest and a handful of village notables would be
gathered and shot. It was the rage and panic of a crowd seeking its
own safety through brutality.

It is plain, then, that the spirit of the crowd is something far other
than that of the individual, and is cap