Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/475

Rh with which to kill recklessly an unhappy man of whose nationality, name, and crime they knew nothing.

When the cholera was raging in Paris in 1833, the report spread through the city rapidly that the disease was the work of poisoners, who, the people were brought to believe, were tampering with food, wells, and wines. Immense multitudes assembled in the public places, and every man who was seen carrying a bottle or a vial or a small package was in imminent danger of his life; the mere possession of a flask was sufficient evidence to convict, in the eyes of the delirious multitude; and many fell victims to its rage. Two persons, flying before thousands of madmen accusing them of having given a poisoned tart to children, took refuge in a guardhouse; the post was surrounded in an instant, and nothing could have prevented the murder of the accused men if two officers had not conceived the happy thought of eating one of the tarts in full view of the mob. The mob burst into laughter, and the men were saved. These follies are of all kinds, and the mobs are of every race and every climate—Roman mobs, charging Christians with the burning of Rome or the destruction of a legion, and throwing them to wild beasts; mobs of the middle ages, entertaining the most absurd suspicions against the Albigenses, the Jews, or any heretic, the spread of which was independent of proof; German mobs of Muzer in the Reformation; French mobs of Jourdan in the Reign of Terror—the spectacle is always the same. The inconsistency of mobs is illustrated by what Dr. Zambuco Pasha relates of certain Eastern villages where leprosy exists; where the populace are ready to chase any one suspected of having leprosy, and even to execute lynch law upon him; yet the same populace go to chapels attended by leprous persons, kiss the images they have kissed, and take the communion from the same chalices with them.

Mobile, inconsistent, and without real traditions as mobs are, they are, nevertheless, subject to routine; and in this they differ from corporations, which in their whole period of ascendency are traditionalist and progressive, and progressive because they are traditionalist. The power of routine over men casually brought together was curiously illustrated to me a few years ago at the rooms of a cure by inhalation at Mont Doré, where the three or four hundred men assembled to take the vapors issuing from a boiler in the middle of the apartment, having nothing to do or say, proceeded to march in procession around the room, and always walked in the same direction—that of the hands of a watch; and all efforts to start them in the opposite direction failed. An instance of the power of suggestion to start the crowd was furnished in a dissecting room, where the work could be carried on in the midst of conversation or singing. Some one would break