Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/406

394 are feeling as he does. Each stage in the consequent growth of this feeling in extent and in intensity is perceived, and so fosters sympathy and a disposition to go with the mass. Will we not inevitably by this series of interactions get that "out"-look which characterizes the human atom in the mob?

The bulletin, the flying rumor, "the man in the street," and the easy swarming for talk or harangue open those paths between minds, and prepare those contacts that permit the ambient mass to press almost irresistibly upon the individual. But why will this phenomenon be limited to the people huddled on a few square miles of city ground? Mental touch is not bound up with proximity. With the telegraph to collect and transmit the expressions and signs of the ruling mood, and the fast mail to hurry to the eager clutch of waiting thousands the still damp sheets of the morning daily, remote people are brought as it were into one another's presence. Through its organs the excited public is able to assail the individual with a mass of suggestion almost as vivid as if he actually stood in the midst of an immense crowd.

Formerly, within a day a shock might throw into a fever all within a hundred miles of its point of origin. The next day it might agitate the zone beyond, but meanwhile the first body of people would have cooled down and would be disposed to listen to reason. And so, while a wave of excitement passed slowly over a country, the entire folk mass was at no moment in the same state of agitation.

Now, however, our space-annihilating devices, by transmitting a shock without loss of time, make it all but simultaneous. A vast public shares the same rage, alarm, enthusiasm, or horror. Then, as each part of the mass becomes acquainted with the sentiment of all the rest, the feeling is generalized and intensified. A rise of emotional temperature results which leads to a similar reaction. In the end the public swallows up the individuality of the ordinary man, as the crowd swallows up the will of its members.

It is plain that in matters of policy this instant consensus of feeling or opinion works for ill if it issues in immediate action. Formerly the necessary slowness of focusing and ascertaining the common will insured pause and deliberation. Now the swift appearance of a mass sentiment threatens to betray us into hot-headed or ill-considered measures. Sudden heats and flushes take the place of reflection and resolve; and with this comes a growing impatience with the checks and machinery that prevent the public from giving immediate effect to its will. As the working of representative government thus becomes less clumsy, there disappears some of that wholesome deliberateness which has distinguished indirect from direct democracy.