Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/467

Rh —have been the panaceas demanded by suffering multitudes. The superstition of the jury is the offspring of a similar error, always mistaken and constantly reviving. In reality these bodies were never simple meetings of persons, but rather corporations like certain great religious orders or certain great civil or religious organizations, that have at times responded to the wants of the people. Still it should be observed that, even under their corporative form, collective bodies have shown themselves impotent to create anew. This is the case, however smoothly working may be the mechanism in which they are adjusted and geared. For how is it possible to match in simultaneous complication and elasticity the structure of that cerebral organism which every one of us bears in his head?

As long, therefore, as a well-organized brain excels the best-constituted parliament in rapid and sure performance, in the prompt absorption and elaboration of multiple elements, and in the intimate solidarity of innumerable agents, it will be puerile, however plausible it may seem a priori, to count on mass meetings or on deliberative bodies, rather than on one man, to deliver a country from a difficult situation. In fact, every time a nation passes through one of those periods when it has an imperious need of great mental capacity as well as of great heart movements, the necessity imposes itself of a personal government, whether under the form of a republic or of a monarchy, or under color of a parliament.

The preceding considerations may be of use in determining wherein lies the responsibility of leaders for acts committed by the groups which they direct. An assembly or association, a mob or a sect, has no other thought than the one that inspires it; and it matters not that this thought, this more or less intelligent indication of an end to be pursued or of a means to be employed, is propagated from the brain of one to the brains of all—it continues the same. The one who inspired it is therefore responsible for its direct effects. But the emotion associated with this idea, and which is propagated along with it, does not continue the same as it spreads, but is intensified in a sort of mathematical progression; and what may have been a moderate desire or a halting opinion with the instigator—with the first whisperer of a suspicion, for example, ventured against a category of citizens—promptly becomes passion and conviction, hatred and fanaticism in the fermentable mass into which the germ has fallen. The intensity of emotion that moves the throng and carries it to excess, in the good or evil it does, is therefore largely its own work, the effect of the mutual warming up of those souls in contact by their mutual reflection; and it would be as unjust to impute to any one director all the crimes to which this over-excitement may