ress. Not only in Europe but in Asia and in Africa new cultural
contacts have undermined and broken down the old cultures. The effect
has been to loosen all the social bonds and reduce society to its
individual atoms. The energies thus freed have produced a world-wide
ferment. Individuals released from old associations enter all the more
readily into new ones. Out of this confusion new and strange political
and religious movements arise, which represent the groping of men for a
new social order.

3. The Crowd and the Public

Gustave Le Bon, who was the first writer to call attention to the
significance of the crowd as a social phenomenon,[281] said that mass
movements mark the end of an old regime and the beginning of a new.

"When the structure of a civilization is rotten, it is always the masses
that bring about its downfall."[282] On the other hand, "all founders of
religious or political creeds have established them solely because they
were successful in inspiring crowds with those fanatical sentiments
which have as result that men find their happiness in worship and
obedience and are ready to lay down their lives for their idol."[283]

The crowd was, for Le Bon, not merely any group brought together by the
accident of some chance excitement, but it was above all the emancipated
masses whose bonds of loyalty to the old order had been broken by "the
destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which
all the elements of our civilization are rooted." The crowd, in other
words, typified for Le Bon the existing social order. Ours is an age of
crowds, he said, an age in which men, massed and herded together in
great cities without real convictions or fundamental faiths, are likely
to be stampeded in any direction for any chance purpose under the
influence of any passing excitement.

Le Bon did not attempt to distinguish between the crowd and the public.
This distinction was first made by Tarde in a paper entitled "Le Public
et la foule," published first in _La Revue de Paris_ in 1898, and
included with several others on the same general theme under the title
_L'Opinion et la foule_ which appeared in 1901. The public, according to
Tarde, was a product of the printing press. The limits of the crowd are
determined by the length to which a voice will carry or the distance
that the eye can survey. But the public presupposes a higher stage of
social development in which suggestions are transmitted in t