Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/371

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 357

why crowds, though they have destroyed despotisms, have never built free states. They have abolished evils, but they have never instituted works of beneficence. Essentially atavistic and sterile, the crowd ranks as the lowest of the forms of human association.

Yet there are times when crowds socialize men and so fit them for better modes of association. Upon the sudden collapse of a worm-eaten social framework in which people have felt themselves imprisoned there comes a moment of deliquescence, of atomism. Now the crowd which at such crises comes forward as the chief means of collective action may by the very unisons and sympathies it inspires aid in re-socialization, and so pave the way to higher forms of social life. Overruling with its mighty diapason the old dissonances of rank, birth, occupation, and locality, it helps weld "the people." The national spirit of France did not spring into life full-statured at the fall of the Bastille. It grew up gradually out of great common experiences in the mobs, the risings at the sound of the tocsin, the levies en masse, the political gatherings, and the vast concourse at civic festivals. Likewise the American national spirit seems to have had its birth in the numerous tumultuous gatherings that near the beginning of our Revolution mobbed the officials and perse- cuted the friends of George III. Perhaps even the unexpected unity of southern feeling in 1861 was prepared in the crowds that wildly cheered the secession speeches of Yancey and 'Toombs during their years of agitation.

From the clear inferiority of crowds those who make sociology consist in collective psychology draw a very unfa- vorable opinion of social groupments. To the maxim, "In union there is strength," they would add, "In union there is deterioration." By insisting that all associations possess less wit and conscience than do their members, they virtually impeach social evolution, which implies, for one thing, a development of group-units in variety, extent, and complexity. In the very heart of social life lies coiled the worm of decay, and there seems to be no hope for the triumph of wisdom short of the rule of the strong man, the Uebermensch of Nietzsche.