crusades, partly because of the religious fervor and fanaticism
with which they are usually conducted and partly because they are an
appeal to the masses of the people for direct action and depend for
their success upon their ability to appeal to some universal human
interest or to common experiences and interests that are keenly
comprehended by the common man.

The Woman's Christian Temperance Crusade, referred to in the materials,
may be regarded, if we are permitted to compare great things with small,
as an illustration of collective behavior not unlike the crusades of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Crusades are reformatory and religious. This was true at any rate of the
early crusades, inspired by Peter the Hermit, whatever may have been the
political purposes of the popes who encouraged them. It was the same
motive that led the people of the Middle Ages to make pilgrimages which
led them to join the crusades. At bottom it was an inner restlessness,
that sought peace in great hardship and inspiring action, which moved
the masses.

Somewhat the same widespread contagious restlessness is the source of
most of our revolutions. It is not, however, hardships and actual
distress that inspire revolutions but hopes and dreams, dreams which
find expression in those myths and "vital lies," as Vernon Lee calls
them,[297] which according to Sorel are the only means of moving the
masses.

The distinction between crusades, like the Woman's Temperance Crusade,
and revolutions, like the French Revolution, is that one is a radical
attempt to correct a recognized evil and the other is a radical attempt
to reform an existing social order.

II. MATERIALS

A. SOCIAL CONTAGION

1. An Incident in a Lancashire Cotton Mill[298]

At a cotton manufactory at Hodden Bridge, in Lancashire, a girl, on the
fifteenth of February, 1787, put a mouse into the bosom of another girl,
who had a great dread of mice. The girl was immediately thrown into a
fit, and continued in it with the most violent convulsions for
twenty-four hours. On the following day three more girls were seized in
the same manner; and on the seventeenth, six more. By this time the
alarm was so great that the whole work, in which 200 or 300 were
employed, was totally stopped, and an idea prevailed that a particular
disease had been introduced by a bag of cotton opened in the house. On
Sunday, the eighteenth, Dr. St. Clare was sent for from Preston; before
he arr