Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/471

Rh played by leaders has not, in mobs at least, had the universality and importance which we attribute to it. There are, in fact, mobs without an apparent leader. Famine prevails in a region; on every side the starving masses rise, demanding bread: no chief appears here, but spontaneous unanimity. Let us look a little closer. All these uprisings do not break out together; they follow one another like a powder fuse, beginning with a primary spark. A first riot took place somewhere, in a place suffering more and more effervescent than the others, more exploited by agitators, apparent or secret, who gave the signal for revolt. The outbreak was then imitated in neighboring places, and the new agitators, thanks to their predecessors, had less to do; and from vicinage to vicinage, from mob to mob, their work is propagated with an increasing force that detracts correspondingly from the efficiency of local directors; till at last, particularly after the popular cyclone has spread beyond the bounds where there is any reason for it, or beyond the region of scarcity, no direction can be perceived. Strangely, indeed, to those who do not comprehend the force of imitative enthusiasm, the spontaneity of the uprising then becomes more complete the less motive there is for it.

Taken in one view, all the tumultuous assemblages which proceed thus from an initial riot in intimate connection with one another—a habitual phenomenon in revolutionary crises—may be regarded as a single mob. There are thus complex mobs, as in physics there are complex waves, chains of groups of waves. Placing ourselves at this point of view, we see that there is no mob without leaders; and we perceive, further, that from the first of these compound mobs to the last the function of the secondary leaders goes on diminishing and that of the primary leaders increasing, augmented at each new tumult born of a preceding tumult by a kind of distant contagion. Epidemics of strikes are a proof of it; the first that breaks out, the one therefore where the grievances are most serious and which consequently should be the most spontaneous of all, always leaves defined behind it the personality of the agitators; those that follow, often without the shadow of a reason, have the appearance of explosions without a match. It thus often happens that a mob started by a nucleus of excited persons goes beyond them, absorbs them, and, becoming headless, seems to have no leader. The truth is that it has none in the same way that raised dough has no yeast. The function of these leaders is, finally and essentially, greater and more distinct in proportion as the mob acts with more concentration, consecutiveness, and intelligence, as it comes nearer to being a moral person, an organized association.

It appears, then, that in every case, notwithstanding the