Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/470

452 among which one is the active ferment, has infected it with his intense and perverted enthusiasm. As every shop has its director, every convent its superior, every brigade its general, every assembly its president, every fraction of an assembly its leader, so every lively saloon has its Coryphæus of conversation, every riot its chief, every court its king, prince, or princelet. If a theater audience can ever properly be regarded as constituting to a certain extent an association, it is when it applauds, because it follows, in clapping, the impulse of an initial applause; and when it is listening, because it yields to the suggestion of the author as expressed by the mouth of the actor who is speaking. Everywhere, then, whether visible or not, there reigns here the distinction between leader and led, so important in fixing responsibility. This is not saying that the wills of all are annihilated in the presence of the will of one; this, too, suggested, the echo of external or anterior voices of which it is only the original condensation—is obliged, in order to impose itself on the others, to make them concessions, and to flatter them in order to lead them. Thus it is with the orator, who has to take care not to neglect oratorical precautions; with the dramatic speaker, who has constantly to bend to the prejudices and changing tastes of his audiences; and with the leader who would manage his party.

Yet the conditions are various according as spontaneous or organized assemblies are in question. In the latter a will to be dominant must arise conformed, in a certain degree, to the tendencies and traditions of the prevailing wills; but once arisen, it executes itself with a fidelity the more perfect the wiser the organization of the body. In mobs an imperative will does not have to conform itself to traditions that do not exist, and may even get itself obeyed, notwithstanding its weak agreement with the tendencies of the majority; but, whether conformed or not, it is always imperfectly executed, and suffers changes in imposing itself. We can affirm that all the forms of human association are distinguished, first, by the way in which one thought or will among a thousand becomes the director of them under conditions of conflict of thoughts and wills from which it comes out victorious; second, by the greater or less facility which is offered in them for the propagation of the directing thought or will.

The objection has been made, with some force, that the part