otional reactions of his inferiors. It is
thus that they explain the well-known violence and imbecility of crowds.
The crowd, as a crowd, performs acts that many of its members, as
individuals, would never be guilty of. Its average intelligence is very
low; it is inflammatory, vicious, idiotic, almost simian. Crowds,
properly worked up by skilful demagogues, are ready to believe anything,
and to do anything.

Le Bon, I daresay, is partly right, but also partly wrong. His theory is
probably too flattering to the average numskull. He accounts for the
extravagance of crowds on the assumption that the numskull, along with
the superior man, is knocked out of his wits by suggestion--that he,
too, does things in association that he would never think of doing
singly. The fact may be accepted, but the reasoning raises a doubt. The
numskull runs amuck in a crowd, not because he has been inoculated with
new rascality by the mysterious crowd influence, but because his
habitual rascality now has its only chance to function safely. In other
words, the numskull is vicious, but a poltroon. He refrains from all
attempts at lynching _a cappella_, not because it takes suggestion to
make him desire to lynch, but because it takes the protection of a crowd
to make him brave enough to try it.

What happens when a crowd cuts loose is not quite what Le Bon and his
followers describe. The few superior men in it are not straightway
reduced to the level of the underlying stoneheads. On the contrary, they
usually keep their heads, and often make efforts to combat the crowd
action. But the stoneheads are too many for them; the fence is torn down
or the blackamoor is lynched. And why? Not because the stoneheads,
normally virtuous, are suddenly criminally insane. Nay, but because they
are suddenly conscious of the power lying in their numbers--because they
suddenly realize that their natural viciousness and insanity may be
safely permitted to function.

In other words, the particular swinishness of a crowd is permanently
resident in the majority of its members--in all those members, that is,
who are naturally ignorant and vicious--perhaps 95 per cent. All studies
of mob psychology are defective in that they underestimate this
viciousness. They are poisoned by the prevailing delusion that the lower
orders of men are angels. This is nonsense. The lower orders of men are
incurable rascals, either individually or collectively. Decency,
self-restraint,