Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/469

Rh a grand corporation, like the France of Saint Louis. It was the same with what were called corporations under the old system of institutions; they were less corporations in the usual sense than federations of shops, these last very small corporations, each in itself authoritatively ruled by a patron. But when a common danger prompted all the workmen of the same branch of industry to unite for a common end, such as the gaining of a suit, just as all the citizens of a nation would unite in war time, the federative bond was closed up at once, and a governing personality was revealed. In the intervals between these unanimous co-operations, the association confined itself, in the associated shops, to the pursuit of a certain æsthetic or economical ideal, as in the intervals between wars the cultivation of a certain patriotic ideal constitutes the national life of citizens. A modern nation, under the prolonged action of leveling ideas, tends to become again a grand complex mob, directed to a greater or less extent by national or local leaders. But the necessity for hierarchical order in these enlarged societies is so imperious that by a paradox, the more remarkable as they are more democratic, they are often forced to become more and more military.

Between the two extreme poles which I have just marked may be placed certain temporary groups, recruited according to a fixed rule or subjected to a summary regulation, like the jury; or habitual meetings for pleasure, such as a literary salon of the eighteenth century, the court of Versailles, or a theater audience, which, although their object and common interest are trivial, accept a rigorous etiquette and a fixed hierarchy of different stations; or scientific and literary conferences—academies—which are rather collections of coexchangeable talents than groups of colaborers. Among the varieties of the species corporation may be named conspiracies and sects, which are sometimes criminal. Parliamentary assemblies are entitled to a place by themselves; they have more of the nature of mobs, complex and contradictory mobs—double mobs, we might say, as we speak of double monsters in which a tumultuous majority is opposed by a minority or a coalition of minorities, and in which, consequently and fortunately, the evil of unanimity, that great danger of mobs, is partially neutralized.

Mob or corporation, however, all the species of true association have this identical and permanent characteristic, that they are produced, and led to a greater or less extent, by a chief, apparent or hidden; most frequently hidden in the case of mobs, but always apparent and obvious in corporations. From the moment when a mass of men begins to vibrate with an identical tremor, takes life and advances toward its end, it may be assumed that some guiding spirit or leader, or a group of leaders and moving spirits.