Page:The Source and Aim of Human Progress.djvu/34

30 this terrible mental epidemic. If anyone happened by chance to escape the plague and give a word of warning he was promptly accused of disloyalty, interned, imprisoned, immured in a cell for years of torture. It seemed as if the insane asylums had opened wide their gates and let loose their populations to hold frenzied meetings, and parade the streets in processions of wild excitement with banner, flag, and drum for the salvation of the country. Thus a German medical eye-witness of all those militaristic orgies expressed himself in private: "The streets are now full of the unbalanced and the insane; this is their hour. .  .  .  The war will afford a free arena for every instinct and every form of insanity."

Many of those parades and processions were at first staged and controlled by the ever present hands of the central government and the ruling classes. Then the highly virulent mental germs skillfully inoculated took a hold in the subconscious mind of European humanity; the disease developed rapidly, spread like wild fire, and raged unabated throughout the width and length of the central empires. This virulent epidemic soon spread to neighboring nations, and like its deadly associate, the influenza, reached the farthest corner of the habitable globe. In some nations there was a lull of 'neutrality,' the incubating period, followed by an ever rising temperature of popular excitement, breaking out in series of 'preparedness parades' occurring all over the country from imperial New York, the stockyards of Chicago, the mines and vineyards of California to towns, villages, and hamlets. At first social hypnotization was staged by organizers, leaders, and hypnotizers in the form of parades and processions with banners and flags, to the sound of drums and orations reverberated and magnified by the boom and thunder of the press. The hypnotization took effect, and the demon of the demons began to stir in the depths of the subconscious social self.

Repetition and impressive, persistent suggestion finally brought about a lodgement of the virus in almost every individual of the social aggregate. Neither the learned nor the ignorant could escape the pressure of social suggestion. The way they tumbled one after another or rather one over another as victims to the fatal influence should have been a study of the utmost interest to the student of Social Psychology. Lay, literary and scientific periodicals were full of war literature. Versifiers sang of "the blood-red glory cross of war" while soldiers and sailors made love not only in halls and on the streets, but also in all the best sellers and novelettes. All the posters, all the