Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/472

454 attached to the character of its members, the association, as a whole, is worth what its chief is worth. His character is the factor of pre-eminent importance; a little less, it is perhaps true, in mobs; but in them, on the other hand, while a bad choice of a chief may not produce as disastrous consequences as in a corporative association, the chances in favor of a good choice are much less. Multitudes and assemblages, even parliamentary bodies, are quick to be infatuated with a fine speaker, with any stranger; but the collegia of ancient Rome, the churches of the early Christians, all corporations of every kind, when they come to elect their prior, their bishop, or their syndic, have long been accustomed to examine into his character; or, if they receive him all fitted out, as in an army, it is at the hands of an intelligent and well-informed authority. They are less exposed to "ring rule," for they do not live continually in a single body, but most usually in a dispersed condition that leaves their members, freed from the constraint of contacts, to be influenced by their own reason. Besides, when the excellence of the chief of a body has been recognized, he may die, but his acts will survive him; the founder of a religious order, canonized after his death, continues to act in the hearts of his disciples; and to the influence he exerts is added that of all the abbes and reformers who succeeded him, and whose prestige, like his, grows and is refined by distance in time; while the honest leaders of mobs —for there are such—cease to act as soon as they have disappeared, and are more easily forgotten than replaced. Mobs obey men, living and present only, men of physical and corporeal prestige, never phantoms of ideal perfection, immortalized memories. As I have just mentioned in passing, corporations in their long existence, sometimes of several centuries, present a series of perpetual leaders, grafted, as it were, upon one another and complementing one another; another difference from mobs, in which there is at most a group of temporary and simultaneous leaders who reflect and aggrandize one another. There are other differences. The worst leaders are liable to be chosen and endured by multitudes, and the worst suggestions of all that are offered to be adopted. This is because, first, the most contagious notions or ideas are those which are most intense; and, secondly, the most intense ideas are the narrowest and most