Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/473

Rh false, striking the senses and not the mind, and the most intense emotions are the most egotistical. This is why it is easier in a mob to propagate a puerile fancy than an abstract truth, a comparison than a reason, faith in a man or suspicion of him than attachment to a principle or renunciation of a prejudice; and why the pleasure of vilifying being more lively than the pleasure of admiring, and the sentiment of preservation stronger than that of duty, hootings are more easily started than bravoes, and spasms of panic are more frequent than impulses of courage.

It has been remarked that mobs are generally inferior in intelligence and morality to the average of their members. Not only is the social compound in this case, as it always is, dissimilar to the elements of which it is the product or combination rather than the sum, but it is also habitually worthless. This is true, however, only of mobs and aggregations that resemble them. But where the spirit of the organization (esprit de corps) rather than the spirit of the mob prevails, it usually happens that the composite, in which the genius of a grand organizer survives, is superior to its existing elements. Accordingly, as a company of actors is a corporation or a mob—that is, as it is more or less trained and organized—its members will play together better or worse than when separately they speak monologues. In a highly disciplined body, like the police, excellent rules for hunting criminals, hearing witnesses, and drawing up processes are transmitted traditionally, and fortify the mind of the individual in its reliance on a higher reason. While we can say with truth, adopting a Latin proverb, that senators are good men and the senate is an unruly beast, I have had a hundred occasions to remark that the gendarmes, though generally intelligent, are less so than the gendarmerie. A general made the same remark to me while drilling his recruits. Questioned separately concerning military maneuvers, he found them all stupid; but when they were brought together he was surprised to see them perform with a harmony and spirit, with an air of collective intelligence, very superior to what they had shown singly. The regiment, therefore, is often braver, more generous, and more moral than the soldier. Doubtless, corporations, whether regiments, religious orders, or sects, go further than mobs both in mischief and in well-doing; from the best disposed mobs to the most criminal is a less distance than from the noblest exploits of our armies to the worst excesses of Jacobinism, or from the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul to the Camorrists and the anarchists; and M. Taine, who has depicted with much vigor criminal mobs and criminal sects, has shown that the latter were more