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SOCIAL LIFE AND
THE CROWD
 
SOCIAL LIFE
AND THE CROWD

BY
J LIONEL TAYLER, MRCS, L.R.C.P,

London University Extension Lecturer on Biokgy and Sociology

BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

f 4 ¥ |
/ i
 
PREFACE

Turis short volume is not written as a text book
on the Crowd Problem, still less as a history of
that problem, but as a brief, suggestive and, it is
hoped, serviceable introduction to a new prospect,
or perhaps a much more extended vision in an old
prospect, of a subject which is coming to be
recognised as of increasing vital importance.

I am indebted to several friends for kindly com-
ments and suggestions on the text.

The book has grown out of lectures given at the
meeting of ‘“ The Women’s International League
for Peace and Freedom ’’ held at Salzburg at their
1921 Summer School, with additional notes taken
from earlier lectures on social subjects.

LL.1T
 
CONTENTS
PAGE

PREFACE  .  .: . « ‘aiii.iina iis

PART 1}
THE DECLINE OF RATIONALISM

CHAP.
1. INTRODUCTORY. THE SITUATION . . i
II. THE EMOTIONAL AND PASSIONAL POWERS
BEHIND DEMOCRACIES AND ARIS-

TOCRACIES : ‘ . : . 16
[iI. THE PEOPLE AND THE CROWD PROBLEM.

THE DREAM OF AN EASY SOLUTION . 25
IV. PSEUDO-DEMOCRATIC FULFILMENT AND

REACTION . , . . : Lina

V. SOME EVIDENCE OF THE FAILURE OF
MODERN PSEUDO - DEMOCRACIES.
THE PRESS . A : 3 ; i AON

VI. SOME EVIDENCE OF THE FAILURE OF
MODERN PSEUDO - DEMOCRACIES. :
THE READING PUBLIC . . . 51

VII. THE BREAKDOWN OF THE RATIONALISTIC
DEMOCRATIC THEORY. WITH APPENDIX 62

PART 11

NEW THEORIES OF POPULAR
GOVERNMENT

VIII. THE NEW POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE OF
ROUSSEAU, HEGEL AND GLADSTONE . 81

7
8 CONTENTS

CHAP, PAGE
1X. ROUSSEAU’S GENERAL AND OTHER SOCIAL
WILLS ' : ' . . 8g

X. HEGEL'S “ REAL” AND INCIDENTAL WILLS 97
XI. GLADSTONE’S POLITICAL SUPRA-HUMANISM 110

XII. RESEMBLANCES AND DIFFERENCES OF
OUTLOOK AND THE DEMAND FOR
SCIENTIFIC STUDY TO SUPPORT THE
NEW THEORIES . . . , «122

PART 111

THE NEW CROWD STUDY. ITS
FOUNDATION IN FEELING, NOT

REASON
XIII. THE NEW CROWD STUDY. ITS TWO
SCHOOLS ‘ . : 120
XIV. THE NEO - COMMUNISTS—WHO STRESS
BASIC FEELINGS . ‘ . . 155
XV. MASS RETROGRESSION—A DANGER . . 107

XVI. THE CHECKING OF MASS RETROGRESSION 173
XVII. GREGARIOUS MOTIVES NOT ENOUGH FOR

SOCIAL EVOLUTION . : : . 177

XVIII. THE NEO-INDIVIDUALISTS' SOCIAL SYN-
THESIS AND ARISTO-DEMOCRACY . 183

XIX. THE SOCIAL ORIENTATION OF INDIVID-
UAL DESIRE . i ; . 102

XX. SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS AND THE
NEED FOR PERSONAL AND SOCIAL
HUMAN IDEALS . . : . : 217
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTORY. THE SITUATION

AT a time when Democracy—which may be
popularly defined as an optimistic belief in the
capacity of any unfettered multitude to govern
itself—is being triumphantly voiced by the popu-
lace as the one and only principle of social pro-
gress, it is not a little curious to observe how
whenever and wherever the rule of this actual
multitude takes place it tends to arouse in the real
social student, and even in democratic leaders
themselves who observe its groping, amceba-like
activities, increasing terror and dismay.

The older social students, and even politicians,
took the people on trust, they asked no questions,
they assumed qualities in human nature which
were flagrantly at variance with the most obvious,
frequent and fundamental facts of daily observa-
tion. All living creatures have senses which they
none the less use only along very limited paths,
and men and women have eyes and see not, have

ears and hear not, except in certain often unex-
11
12, :50CIAL- LIFE AND THE CROWD
pected directions. "It takes a very little impartial
experience to reveal that opinions, and often very
dogmatic ones, are very seldom formed as a result
of either observation or study, and such study as
exists is almost always undertaken to confirm what
are already interested and selfish motives. And a
deeper study of the vagaries of fashion; of the
sophistical strength of prejudiced opinion; of the
extreme rarity of scholarly wisdom or even disin-
terested common sense in the discussion of almost
any subject, springs a mine under the views of
the believer in Democracy and ‘‘ government by
the people,”’ which leaves a yawning, deep and
vast gulf in thought incapable of being bridged
by any rationalistic assumption of the reasonable
in human beings.

If the power of desire is so tremendous in
making our thoughts sophisticated, will not this
force always exist, and, if so, is education really
the great political remedial agent that once was
dreamed; is there not, as it were, a subtle psycho-
logical chemistry with laws of affinities and com-
binations and with groupings of individuals as
social units which must be understood before any
safe political theories can be formed? This
awakening to the obvious facts of the situation
has led most modern social students to realise
that the psychological, even temperamental, study
of men’s and women’s natures and of the way
INTRODUCTORY, 13

these temperaments herd, crowd, group and con-
sort with and repel each other is the only solid
basis on which theories of government, whether
democratic or otherwise, can be built.

In this modern outlook the investigator is falling
into line with the experience, if not always the
teaching, of Genius in all ages. Genius mostly
begins by trusting the people, it mostly ends by
being persecuted or neglected by this very people
to whom it has appealed. Simple unaided culture
and discovery do not win their way by inherent
cultural qualities.

This is not, however, to assert that the modern
tendency of inquiry is to echo the old vulgar con-
tempt for the masses of humanity which people of
wealth and position once felt for what was unsym-
pathetically called the ‘‘ rabble,” all human beings
are seen in a new light, at once less and more
favourable ; the perspective of the problem is found
to be more complicated; and though difficult, it
is hoped that, by natural history methods, facts
will be obtained which will open up a scientific
solution. :

The upholders of Democracy began with a
theory of humanity which was too simple; they
discovered with dismay, and are still discovering,
that human relationships are very complex and

1 See the author’s paper ‘The Study of Individuals”. in Soco-
logical Papers, Vol. iii., Macmillan & Co., 1907.
14 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

difficult, and this dismay has led to the develop-
ment of a social psychology and biology upon
which all future theories of government will prob-
ably rest. The behaviour of a people must be
scientifically interpreted, it cannot be taken blindly
on trust. This is a modern discovery of stupend-
ous significance.

What follows in this volume is in no sense a
criticism of Democracy as Democracy; it is a
general criticism, which experience will corrobor-
ate, of all simple theories of government. The
general trend of social study throughout the world
is towards the recognition of a like complexity of
social reactions to that which Hamlet discovers in
the individual human mind.

i. In mental development desires act, react and
interact, and circumstance plays upon them,
the mind is more than the rational by itself
can explain.

2. There is a kind of harmony that the playing
upon these desires reveals, not a logical
sequence, and discords and antagonisms are
aroused when desires are jangled together,
not played.

3. Complex as playing on a flute, or other
musical instrument is, this playing is yet
very simple when compared with human
reactions.

“ Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing
J Te

INTRODUCTORY 13

you make of me. You would play upon me; you
would seem to know my stops; you would pluck
out the heart of my mystery; you would sound
me from my lowest note to the top of my compass.
. . . Why do you think I am easier to play than
a pipe? ’'!

Shakespeare in this saw dimly what to-day is
becoming clearer vision. How unworthy a reality
one makes of the individual mind and the social
spirituality of a nation or an age when one pro-
poses simple logical or simple emotional explan-
ations of human activities. The failure of all such
simple views of government is what crowd
psychology and modern social investigation have
revealed. And it is this failure which is now to
be discussed.

1 Hamlet, Act iii., Scene 3,
CHAPTER II

THE EMOTIONAL AND PASSIONAL POWERS BEHIND
DEMOCRACIES AND ARISTOCRACIES

IT is necessary at this point to make a digression.
The word aristocracy is often used to label all past
governments in which the appellation ‘‘ king ’’ or
‘ emperor ’’ or some similar supreme title is
applied to the social leader, and corresponding
ones to signify specific rank to his chief followers,
while other words such as ‘ president’ and
‘“ senator »’ are considered to be the sure symbols
of democratic power. This is reversing the
Shakespearean claim that ‘“ a rose by any other
name would smell as sweet,”” and implies that a
name gives the qualities to that which bears it,
very much as one occasionally finds people who
really believe that the words Mary and Jane and
John and Henry confer some mysterious character-
istics upon those who are so christened and that
ever after each will bear the qualities which some
birthday-book gives them. It is a curious fact, as

Huxley and other writers have pointed out, how
16
pena 2

THE POWERS BEHIND 17

much names and labels do mislead even wise
minds, a dog that is given a bad name being as
good as already hung; and the political field is
not exempt from this danger. To-day aristocracy
is an unpopular name and democracy popular, but
perhaps not one human being in a million asks
what are the realities behind such words. An
enlightened people might choose its best citizens,
not its most popular ones, as its representatives,
and it would then be both aristocratic and demo-
cratic at the same time, so that there is no necessary
antagonism between aristocracy and democracy in
their highest meanings. An autocratic govern-
ment, however, is one in which the people exercise
little control over government processes, while in
a democratic one the people exercise great, perhaps
even preponderating power. Between autocracy
and democracy there is a clash of principles,
though even here if the autocratic is looked upon
as a patriarchal or paternal form of government
and the democratic as fraternal, there is no deep
and lasting antagonism, only a people needs more
direct guidance in the early periods of its growth
than it does in its later ones, so that, as has often
been pointed out, the only true antagonism is

~ between the good and bad forms of the same type

of government.
But behind the forms of government of both

aristocracy and democracy are unnamed rulers
B
13 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

who are the real powers ‘‘ behind the throne,”
and it is necessary that we should discuss these.
‘ Aristocratic’’ is used in two senses. It
sometimes implies a best type of ruler that is bred,
at other times a best type that is selected, more
often both of these ideas are confused together.
Occasionally it is quite loosely defined as govern-
ment by the few.! But it is, of course, obvious
that an aristocracy in the Socratic, Platonic and
Aristotelian as well as in the modern eugenic and
hygienic senses, has never had even an approach
to an existence except in the crudest way in
Sparta. The conception of an hereditary and
hygienically selected best and, because best, ruling
class in a nation is at present a dream of the
Maybe; it never has been, and it would involve so
high a degree of unselfishness in the mass of a
nation’s citizens in order that cliqueism, favourit-
ism, etc., should be subordinated to claims of real
worth as to necessitate a moral and cultural trans-
formation of humanity. Aristocracy is not, then,
a form of government we are leaving behind us,
it is one which involves so high a human standard
as to be near the unrealisable. =~ And democracy
is another and not antagonistic social principle
which is almost as ideal in its remarkable require-
ments, for it assumes a people, a whole united
people, so well-educated and above all so morally

1 See Austin’s treatment of Kant’s view in his Jurisprudence.
 

THE POWERS BEHIND 19

and religiously inspired that a large majority
would vote in accordance with what honour,
research and general culture would demand. To
think such a people to be capable of existing, at
once so enlightened and so noble, is to assume
men and women to be much nearer to the species
‘“ angel »’ than modern social science leads us to
believe possible.

Aristocracy and democracy are not, therefore,
rival political alternatives; indeed, as more than
one authority has pointed out, the future may hold
in store some kind of combination of these ideals;
but they both are governmental dreams of so high
an order as for the moment almost to be unattain-
able. It is necessary to emphasise and underline
this thought because, for the most part, all govern-
ments of the past have been, and are still to-day,
neither artistocratic nor democratic but geneo-
cratic;! and the effort to provide a true democratic
social aim is an effort that is almost new.

We all know what the word genealogy suggests;
it is the acceptance of family and family associa-
tion as a great fact of life; a genealogist is one
who traces descents of people, and genealogising
is the furthering these descent and association
influences. Geneocracies are what almost all past
governments have been, and to grasp this fact

1 Geneocratic is used throughout the present volume as govern-
ment by family influences in the state.
20 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

clearly and firmly is to see something of the diffi-
culty which aristocratic and democratic ideals will
have to face.

In 1826, John Burke first published his Peerage,
which is defined ‘‘ as a genealogical and heraldic
dictionary,” and also his Landed Gentry. Sir
John Burke, his second son, carried on his father’s
task, and to say that these works have been in
constant demand ever since is not to exaggerate
the interest which the volumes have aroused.
Similar modern tendencies exist in other countries.
In 1826 the careful recording of genealogies
began to arise, but the interest was always there.
I will give only two other examples; (1) the
importance attaching to genealogies in the Bible
and other ancient sacred books and (2) primitive
man’s feeling. The evidence Lord Avebury and
other British and continental anthropologists
collected in regard to ancestor worship is a curious
testimony to the all but universal, perhaps wholly
universal, interest in the genealogical aspect. Dr
W. H. R. Rivers (in a paper published in Volume
IIT of the Sociological Review, January, 1910, on
The Genealogical Method of Anthropological
Inquiry) was able to show in detail how the natives
in the Eastern Solomon Islands remembered with
great accuracy long ancestral pedigrees and
attached much importance to them. I will not
refer to family and clan feuds which have existed
THE POWERS BEHIND 21

in regions so widely separated as Italy, Scotland,
France, China and Japan and among the
aborigines of America, Africa and Australia. I
only note the fact that this genealogical factor is
seemingly universal and very powerful, whereas
the aristocratic and democratic principles are not
really vital forces. The phrase ‘‘ A chip of the
old block »’ gives a parental feeling of satisfac-
tion that is an all-time human feeling. Space does
not permit me to enlarge on this but the evidence
is patent and easily obtainable.

The governments of peoples of the past have
been mainly geneocracies which have for their
bases non-discriminating and non-selective blood
ties of family descent, with an admixture of what
are spoken of as social parvenus.

These geneocracies have again and again arisen,
and the geneocrats which they have produced have
as often expressed a contempt for the poor lettered
and the poor unlettered worker, and grouped all
unopulent and all unambitious people together
and branded them as ‘‘ rabble,” ‘‘ canaille,”’ etc.
This contempt men like Samuel Johnson and
Beethoven did much to remove as regards lettered
people, but the proletariat is now itself feeling
that it is time to treat all human beings with
respect as Christ, Buddha and Confucius long
ago taught. Democracy need not then fear the
principle of aristocracy; both have to deal with
22 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

the much more widespread and powerful influence
of geneocracy, which every parent tends to mani-
fest towards his or her child; every man or woman
to a family friend or associate; every member of
a clan, town, county, nation, school, college, class
or race to another member, and which arouses in
sex some of the most complicated issues of
favouritism.

The study of ruling families in a state is a study
of genealogical influences; the study of gild
influences in industry is a study of like family
influences, of which the most colossal example is
the caste system in India, and underneath all the
outward forms of society are the real forces of
family and family friendships which make geneo-
cratic forms of government the dominating ones,
whether it be in the fields of Tammany or Free-
masonry or in the preference a father and mother
give to their child to succeed them in their busi-
ness. Can we hope for a democratic. or an
aristocratic influence or both combined which will
modify and lead upwards to noble and disinterested
social heights this bias of affection and love?
This is the real issue. It would be neither wise
nor possible to seek to obliterate these sources of
sympathy and strength, but can we make them
noble and disinterested? The position is: Are
the age-long geneocracies to become at last
suffused with the democratic or the truly aristo-
THE POWERS BEHIND 23

cratic spirit? And which is the better spirit to
do this or are both required ?

But although the geneocratic influence is of
dominating power, there are two others of only
less commanding strength. ‘‘ Seniores priores ’’
is a phrase which, at any rate, in its meaning is
far older than its Latin clothing, and the little
humorous saying ‘‘ Age before honesty >’ has
historically a sinister justification. The value of
experience, of length of real service, and even of
length of time in a well-lived life is not to be
denied, but seneocratic mass influences in govern-
ment have not always had a value basis.? And if
nepotism is used in the narrower sense, as that
which describes the self-regarding impulses, then
this word also is of great political significance, for
while there is a social insistence on personal needs
which is quite justifiable, there is also a parasitic
mutualism among the self-seeking which is danger-
ous to state efficiency.

It would seem, then, that there are six powerful
political groups of factors—geneocratic, seneo-
cratic, nepotic, autocratic, aristocratic and demo-
cratic, and of these the first four are both the
dangerous and the common influences. All six
of them require much more research than they
have hitherto received and lead us to a new study

1 Perhaps these have a geneocratic patriarchal origin, but they
present a problem of their own.
24 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

of the habits of life of groups of men and women
and to other crowd problems.

It must be understood that the author is simply
trying to state facts and is not casting aspersions.
What led to pride of family, the particular
psychology which educed and educes it, is a matter
for investigation. How such words as ‘‘ rabble ”’
with their connotations came into existence is
another problem, the author simply states the fact
that they did come. And the book would have
to be greatly enlarged and lose its present
character if the many exceptions to the rule were
carefully examined. For instance, it is true, even
to this day, that family pride takes precedence
over cultural pride (it is not suggested that either
form of this feeling is praiseworthy), but family
pride in protecting the learned man through
patronage (and sometimes very real affection and
respect were added) did a great deal for literature,
art, music, religion and even science, and as at
first the ‘‘ great families ’’ were mostly military,
their protection of the unmilitary student in past
warlike periods was a very real assistance to the
general growth of mental life in the nation. The
object the author has in view is simply to point
out that blind geneocratic and autocratic forces
were almost immeasurably stronger than aristo-
cratic and democratic ones.
CHAPTER 11

THE PEOPLE AND THE CROWD PROBLEM. THE DREAM
OF AN EASY SOLUTION

WHEN Europe awakened to social inquiry at the
Reformation, the mass or crowd problem did not
at first present itself as a problem. Milton has a
paper entitled The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth and this is expres-
sive of his whole attitude, and no other writer who
thought of democratic awakening conceived of it
as other than an easy enlightenment. John Locke,
like Milton, assumed that people would use their
liberty and their education wisely.! Lessing,
though more cautious, also thought that freedom
is the safe and obvious road to learning. ‘‘It is
not true that speculations upon these things have
ever done harm or become injurious to the body
politic. You must find fault not with specula-
tions, but with the folly and tyranny of checking

1 Probably he was thinking of a /Zmited popular control, as he
did not think truth and reason are popularly appreciated.
26 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

them.”’* Channing, Emerson, and the whole of
the New England poets, Cullen Bryant, Long-
fellow, Lowell, Whittier, echoed the same thought,
and Mill, from the rational standpoint, saw in
Liberty no real danger.

Mazzini at times saw that there was at least a
case for another side. Thoughts upon Democracy
in Europe, written for the People’s Journal in 1847
contains a great many wise statements. He says
‘“ even among the friends of democracy there are
men who put their hands to the work with hesita-
tion, and who sometimes appear seized with vague
terror *’; and again ‘‘ Give the suffrage to a people
unfitted for it, governed by hateful reactionary
passions, they will sell it, or make a bad use of
it,”” and his ideal of democracy, ‘‘ the progress of
all through all, under the leading of the best and
wisest,’’ is very far from what democrats are seek-
ing to-day. Yet he believed as Milton and Locke
and Lessing believed before him ‘‘ Men are the
creatures of education and their actions are but
the consequence of the principle of education given
to them ’’;? only open the doors of the palace of
knowledge to men and women and they will read
and study the best, show them the great call and
they will follow it as the lark seeks the sky.
“ Child of Humanity, raise thy brow to the

1 Education of the Human Race, Section 78.
2 7he Duties of Man, Chapter I, Introduction.
THE CROWD PROBLEM 27

sun of God, and read upon the heavens: It
moves. Faith and Action! The future is ours.”
Somewhere in the voice of the people is to be
heard the voice of God. Awaken the people,
give them light and there will be no more to
fear.

The amazing element in this teaching is the
notion that the tremendous world-wide indiffer-
ence, ignorance and sin of the multitude could
rest on so simple and so passive a state as lack of
knowledge. If a Roger Bacon, a Shakespeare, a
John Bunyan, could gain knowledge in spite of
a life’s vicissitudes, why could not the multitudes
of men and women, if they desired it, gain it too?
Of course it may be said, with much truth, that
men and women are not so bad or so indifferent
as their behaviours suggest. The use of narcotics
is world-wide and is almost co-extensive with
human history, and one of the explanations fre-
quently given for this enormous addiction to such
drugs is that the struggle with circumstance
strains men and women almost to the breaking
point. ‘‘ The desire for an emotional release out
of physical suffering or general weakness into a
sense of well-being and even of ecstasy creates the
morphino-maniac and the cocaine victim as well
as the dipsomaniac. The temptation to drugs of

1 Closing words of Faith and the Future.
28 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

addiction in particular arises from the desire to
escape from what Arthur Symons has described in
a suggestive phrase as the ‘ bondage of exterior-
ity.” ’* This is, no doubt, true as an explanation
of the narcotic habit, but it does not meet even the
majority of the cases as so many persons begin
these habits almost in youth, long before the stress
of life is seriously felt; and though the struggle
with circumstance is severe, the circumstance
which counts in making this strain is strictly the
fashion, custom and etiquette of human society
which control personal desires and which human
beings collectively impose on the single individual,
everyone complaining at his own restriction but
approving of such restriction for others, and there-
fore this irksomeness and harshness of our human
surroundings is further proof of the general low
tone of the masses who form, or acquiesce in, such
collective standards. It is not merely a negative
evil we are confronted with but desires which
often obstinately resist enlightenment.

Shakespeare’s works are full of sayings as to the
rarity of virtuous qualities in the average man and
woman.

‘“ How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”’2

 

1 ““The World-Problem of Drugs of Addiction,” paper by Basil
Mathews in Vol. xx. of Z%e British Journal of Inebriety.
2 The Merchant of Venice, Act v., Scene 6.
THE CROWD PROBLEM 29

And his view of the multitude is condemning.

‘“ What many men desire :—that many may be meant
By the fool multitude, that choose by show,
Not learning more than the fond eye doth teach,
Which pries not to the interior . .
I will not choose what many men desire,
Because I will not jump with common spirits,
And rank me with the barbarous multitude.’’1
Here are but two references out of one play and
how easily they could be multiplied! And even
a people’s poet such as Burns, writes of ‘“ Man’s
inhumanity to man” and in his Epistle lo a
Young Friend, he could say:
: “ Ye'll find mankind an unco squad,
And muckle they may grieve ye.”
Yet Mazzini, knowing the little and great naughti-
ness of the world, as Milton, Locke and Lessing
knew it too, knowing that men and women choose
by show, knowing the inhumanity of men and
women to each other, which makes countless thou-
sands mourn, could yet believe that the Child of
Humanity had but to raise its brow to the sun of
God and all would be well. No problems of
temperament, no selfishness, no lust of power, no
sensationalism had to be conquered. Only free-
dom, only education, and the future is that of a
noble-hearted people!
J. A. Symonds has given us this dream in a few
words :
1 The Merchant of Venice, Act ii., Scene 9,
30 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

‘“ These things shall be: a loftier race
Than e’er the world hath known shall rise,
With flame of freedom in their souls,
And light of knowledge in their eyes.

‘“ Man shall love man with heart as pure
And fervent as the young-eyed throng
Who chant their heavenly psalms before

God’s face with undiscordant song.”

We who have lived through an age that is
getting its freedom, is getting its education and
is misusing it, who see the suffrage given and
know how it has been won and how it is now
wasted—we read unmoved of this dream except to
feel amazement that fine and noble minds could
thus delude themselves. For thousands of years,
in all lands, men and women have lived lives of
wastage; desires not reason, desires not faiths,
desires, and these chiefly bodily ones, have been
the kings and queens of life; the problem is to
quicken the better, the nobler side of these desires.
The easy plan has failed, there has come a
reaction of despair, but this too will pass and
leave instead the direct path of religious and
scientific achievement. A great task of spiritual
psychology is before us. It will be a Pilgrim
People’s Slow Progress over hundreds and thou-
sands of years, but humanity will climb its distant
hill-tops at last. It is something to know that
indifference to the crowd problem is at last

passing.
CHAPTER 1V
PSEUDO-DEMOCRATIC FULFILMENT AND REACTION

So far two main points have been illustrated: (1)
that democracy, as an outlook, is not hostile to
aristocracy, as an outlook; that Mazzini himself
almost embodied them in one ideal when he gave
as the aim of democracy ‘‘ the progress of all
through all under the leading of the best and
wisest *’; the real difficulty is to uplift the
universal geneocratic tendency which allows
private, family, and friendly associations and
intrigues to direct public affairs, whereas these
affairs should be organised on disinterested and
impartial principles. Nepotic self-seeking and
autocratic social influences may also when per-
verted be inconsistent with the calls of true
aristocracy and democracy. This is the first,
great, almost supreme and dominating difficulty.
(2) Only less important is it to help men and
women to feel for themselves and others that
““ waste is not the rule of life,”” however much at
times circumstances may appear to suggest this,
31

 
32 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

and to stimulate people to purposeful activity not
by vague words or encouraging fanciful dreams,
which end in nothing, nor by flattery, but by the
study of the sciences of individual and crowd
developments, so that through trained sympathetic
insight the sources of higher human activities may
be reached.

Graham Wallas® says ‘‘ We all feel, indeed, in
1920 much more humble when approaching the
problem of reconstruction, than did the followers
of Rousseau or Adam Smith before the French
Revolution, or the followers of Bentham or
Godwin or Hegel or Mazzini, after the world-war
that ended in 1815.” And the reason for this is
obvious. The Puritan Commonwealth of England
and Cromwell, though it aroused the antagonism
of Scotland and the active dislike later of England
itself, probably was more trusted as a government
than any government has been, and the United
States Republic seemed to confirm this trust with-
out awakening the dislike, but in the French
Revolution, the whole problem of democracy, the
naked rule of a people, stood out in unabashed
ascendancy, and men asked in amazement and fear
or almost trembling hope, what would be the out-
come. But it seemed to mean something, and that
something to-day we are less confident of. Burke
and Wordsworth in England are typical of those

1 Our Social Heritage, p. 24 (1921 edition).
PSEUDO-DEMOCRATIC FULFILMENT 33

who lost confidence in the people’s ability to govern
itself, and Dr Richard Price’s bold, but at the
same time cautious, undetailed and vague predic-
tion that it would end well, was typical of the
other side. These protagonists were the pre-
cursors of students who have tried to face the
issues of what government by the people really
means, and from their time doubts about popular
government have grown in the minds of social
scientific thinkers, while for the masses, the dream
and the practicality of mass government has been
the increasingly favoured commonplace of the
hour.

Hegel was, I fancy, the first great teacher really
to ask the question how could masses of men and
women, so prejudiced, so ignorant, so egotistic
as the vast majority of men and women are even
in the most enlightened countries, wisely govern
themselves, and he honestly faced the issue and
gave to the world the first genuine theory of
democratic government; but since his day, the
real danger of popular government has become
more and more evident and our attitude has become
correspondingly humbler.

Michelet too has had less than Justice done to
his little book on The People, and its endeavour
to understand the peasant mind, the tradesman’s
mind, the modern workman and his machine, and
even the bourgeoisie. He saw, romanticist though

Cc
34 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

he was, the need for a study of human nature as
the basis of all government, a need which Mazzini,
as well as Bentham and the ulitarians, entirely
overlooked, and we may say that in Burke, Price,
Hegel and Michelet,? the study of the people
began to be faced, and that these are the general
founders of the modern political outlook, an out-
look which is critical even where it is not reaction-
ary in its hopes of and for the masses.

Some Frenchmen like Renan, some Germans
like Goethe, Wagner and Nietzsche and quite a
number of Englishmen of whom Goldsmith,
Charles Pearson, John Ruskin, William Morris,
and even at times Gladstone, are examples, looked
upon the whole of modern civilisation with
questioning eyes, and if they did not go so far as
to see in it ‘‘ a sorry scheme of things,” yet felt
that somewhere a blunder, and that a huge one,
had been made. Recently, Mr Sidney Dark, in
a popular little essay on Books and The Man
summarises three of our modern fictionists as
follows :

‘“ Mr Hardy looks out on the world and sighs
at what seems to him its almost unbroken tragedy
and pain ”’ (p. 52). ‘‘ We are all the sport of fate

1 About Gladstone’s influence and views I shall say a word later ;
he feared the sense-gratifying power of modern civilisation, think-
ing that it might destroy religious purpose. Rousseau did not see
the dangers of democratic rule which are at the centre of the problem.
PSEUDO-DEMOCRATIC FULFILMENT 35

and the bigger we are the more fate loves to play
with us” (p. 47).

“ Mr Wells gets into a furious passion at the
muddles and the bewilderments and the pain.
They seem to him unnecessary, the result of sheer
stupidity . . .” (p- 52).

Mr Bennett thinks ‘‘ Modern commercial con-
ditions rob human life of almost all its dignity.”

These attitudes are quite different from what
one might call the French attitude of Comte, the
Positivist, who thought that man is as it were
coming into his own and will put all difficulties
straight; they are widely different from Shakes-
peare’s and Thackeray’s acceptance of a world
process of social conditions too big and vast for
man to understand; they are different from
Dickens’ or Mark Twain’s cheery amusement at
it all and still more different from Channing’s and
Mazzini’s faith. It is a feeling that collective man
has taken the wrong road and is, therefore, the
world over near destruction or at least disaster.
Now this attitude forms undoubtedly a background
on which the narrower criticism of democracy rests,
and it is almost as modern® probably as the desire
for and the criticism of such a democracy, but it
must not be confused with it. It is perhaps the
most vital need of the times to give man, if it can

1 Of course, the evils of cities and civilisations had long been
recognised, but these had not been traced to some defect in the
process of civilisation itself.

 
36 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

be done scientifically, a full belief in the value and
worth of modern civilisation and even of the whole
of human history. But for the moment I am
speaking of the more restricted reaction to
democracy itself.

I will take four competent English writers as
examples of this spirit, and as they are men of
widely different natures and learning their con-
clusions are the more valuable.

George Gissing was not an ordinary novelist;
he has sometimes been spoken of as a ‘‘ sordid ”’
and more often as a ‘‘ depressing ’’ writer, with
what truth I will not now attempt to consider; he
was undoubtedly, like many fictionists and poets,
an erratic character, but he as undoubtedly tried
hard to see the truth and he had very ample oppor-
tunity of meeting with those men and women who
make up the core of what are called the democratic
sections in a community. As to his attitude
towards this proletariat it is difficult to form an
opinion; his own friends are not agreed as to what
this attitude was; but he writes sympathetically,
and as only a sympathetic critic could, of what is
. called working-class life. =~ Demos, published in
1886, is a story in which one theme runs through
the book from its opening to its close, that the
finer qualities of life, our real culture and our real
civilisation will suffer, are now suffering, destruc-
tion by the rule of the many. And in his other
PSEUDO-DEMOCRATIC FULFILMENT 37

works, this idea is repeated unvaryingly. It is
obviously his belief derived from his experience.!

In 1896 Lecky,”? the historian, published
Democracy and Liberty; generally his view
appears to be that there must be a decline in the
qualities of leadership when the full representative
power of a people is once established.

Again twelve years later, Professor Graham
Wallas published a work Human Nature in
Politics, in which he notes that ‘‘ in the very
nations which have most whole-heartedly accepted
representative democracy, politicians and political
students seem puzzled and disappointed by their
experience of it.”

Viscount Bryce is not, I think, a more scholarly
man, and though he has a larger, it is not, I think,
a more intimate experience than the preceding
writers; his American Commonwealth, published
in 1888, is admittedly a world classic, and
his recent Modern Democracies may become
another; they are, indeed, almost the only books
in which something like comprehensive surveys
have been made, surveys, that is, which are not

1 Gissing says in his Ryecroft Papers (16th Section, Spring): —
“I am no friend of the people. As a force by which the tenor of
the time is conditioned they inspire me with distrust, with fear; as
a visible multitude, they make me shrink aloof and often move me
to abhorrence.’’

2 T am not forgetting older warnings like those of Aristotle, and,
more recently, Alison and J. L. Milton, but I have deliberately
chosen those writers who have experienced democratic influences at
work,
33 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

palpably one-sided; yet although Bryce writes
with far more friendliness to the democratic hope
than Lecky, he is almost as definite in his insist-
ence that democracies do not attract the best men
who exist in a nation, and though it may be urged,
as it has been, that other governments do not
achieve this either, it is evident that Bryce is
speaking of public men who wish for public
service, not the great scholars who are for the
most part, rightly or wrongly, detached from
public affairs and have always been so. Bryce
apparently thinks that democracies often arise in
relatively free and relatively enlightened peoples,
but his point is that the national enlightenment is
not made full use of, and the impressive part of
his books is his guarded half-apprehensive praise.
It is as if a sympathetic friend were watching a
younger man’s development and while he can still
respect him, sees delicate and subtle and sometimes
even coarse signs of deterioration in his character,
and while confident of his natural capacity is yet
afraid that he will not ‘‘ make good ’’ his powers

when the final testing comes. It is a qualified
approval which has more of doubt than confidence

in its genuinely friendly attitude. In this it is

more destructively impressive than *‘ damning with

faint praise.’’!

1 Now that the ideal of democracy ‘‘has been tried by time and
by numerous instances, no one could write of it with the Mazzinian
glow.” Professor Hobhouse reviewing Bryce’s ‘Modern Demo-
cracies,”’ Sociological Review, Vol. xiii., p. 126,
PSEUDO-DEMOCRATIC FULFILMENT 39

It is suggested that these four references do
offer a fair sample of a change of opinion, which,
the world over, is steadily being increasingly mani-
fested by thoughtful minds towards this political
problem of the government of a people by itself.
Cheery optimism is often a great evil when it
obscures real weaknesses, as when, for example,
our late nineteenth century health students pro-
claimed the greater vigour and strength of the
modern man, woman and child, when all that the
facts warranted was that modern nations were
served by a better sanitary system which masked
a real fall in vital capacity. A like potent optimism
is now masking much that is extremely dangerous
in the democratic tendency. How far is the rule
of the many a wise one? We may not in the end
go so far as Aristotle in claiming that it never can
be wise or efficient, but there are evident and grow-
ing signs of distrust in thoughtful and informed
minds. One may, therefore, proceed to examine a
little more closely the causes of this distrust, and
we need once again to remind ourselves that it is
not true democracy which has failed, but that
social geneocratic influences which before were
exercised mainly by a few families, are now
spread widely over the whole of society; where
before it was a selective, it is now a disseminated
geneocracy which displays the whole people's
tastes.
CHAPTER V

SOME EVIDENCE OF THE FAILURE OF MODERN
PSEUDO-DEMOCRACIES. THE PRESS

I MusT ask once more that the reader keep in his
mind the pseudo-nature of all existing democracies,
and the general failure of all past governments
because of geneocratic evils; I shall try to omit
these weaknesses and only consider those that
would appear to be of a directly democratic nature
which have forced on the student the need for a
crowd psychological study to combat them. Also
in the references that follow I shall quote chiefly
from British sources, not because I am unaware
of similar movements in other countries; my whole
point is that such movements are world-wide, but
because any statements I may make will not be
thought to be partisan if they are made about a
country and an empire of which I am myself a
loyal citizen. French, German and American
students can easily fill in like data for their own
lands where I have not made special references

to them.
40
THE PRESS 41

THE PRress!?

Of all hopes that have been belied none are
greater and more striking than those which
gathered around what is known as ‘‘ The Press.”
Milton chiefly thought of printing as a source of
widespread dissemination of knowledge, and the
newspaper was less in his mind than the teaching
power of books; could he, however, have had a
dream of what our world’s newspapers have
become in their accessibility and dissemination
and in their daily publication without seeing thetr
contents, he would have felt far more confident
than he was that the power would be used to open,
enlarge and uplift the mind of man, and his con-
fidence would have been shared by the rest of his
contemporaries as is evident by such writers as
Jeremy Taylor in his Discourse of the Liberty of
Prophesying. Put simply, thinking men and
women at first believed that just as the multitude
would not choose rancid and putrid bodily food if
they had an alternative of sweet and wholesome
varieties ; so with mental food. In an open public
market, and the more public the better, the healthy
appeal would survive. We see now this was a very
childlike attitude. Disease is as natural as health
and has its own way of reaching its objective, and

1 Professor Gilbert Murray has rightly insisted that in these
studies of crowd influences, we might have learnt much from the
Greeks and Romans.
42 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

perverted tastes may relish the morbid. Further,
mental tastes cannot be safely compared to bodily
ones; bodily foods which are unhealthy nauseate
us far more definitely than do mental ones.
Lastly, neither Milton nor his contemporaries
knew that in the appeal to an indiscriminate
multitude, it necessarily follows that this appeal
must be lower in proportion to its vastness and
numbers. Beyond this it was assumed that the
free, open market for ideas is easy of attainment,
instead of appallingly difficult.

Milton’s Areopagitica: a Speech for the Liberty
of Unlicensed Printing. To the Parliament of
England is perhaps the world’s classic on this
subject.

The tractate begins by a fine quotation from
Euripides :

‘“ This is true Liberty, when free-born men
Having to advise the public, may speak free,
Which he who can, and will, deserve high praise ;

Who neither can, nor will, may hold his peace;
What can be juster in a state than this?”

it ends by a splendid appeal to cosmopolitan
truth: ‘“ But to redress willingly and speedily
what hath been erred . . . is a virtue (honoured
lords and commons!) answerable to your highest
actions and whereof none can participate but
greatest and wisest men.”

There is in this essay great loftiness, but what
THE: PRESS 43

Milton failed to realise was how others than the
greatest and the wisest would participate in and
determine what should be printed, and flood the
little stream of truth-seekers out of its course, or,
as we say to-day, ‘‘snow it under.” Milton’s
belief was that the many would choose the best
and wisest if they had the opportunity of choice.

The Areopagitica was published in November,
1644.

In a little book on English Journalism by
Charles Pebody, published in 1882, the following
appreciations of journalism, not without justifica-
tion for the journalism of that day, are made.

““ The Press errs, no doubt, now and then, but
it is on the whole, honest, independent, and able;
and as long as that is the case, the English Press,
with all its faults, must remain what it is at present
—one of the ornaments of our public life, one of
the surest guarantees for the purity of our public
men, and one of the bulwarks of public liberty ”’
(p. 25).

And on the last page of the work, the claim is
made that the English Press is the ‘‘ only Press
in the world . . . that has grown purer as it has
grown freer. It is the only Press in the world
that has improved in its tone as it has become
cheaper.”

This is too boastful, though its general conten-
tion was then near the truth; the eighties of last
44 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

century were the high water-mark of English
journalism ;' but already though the tone is still
Miltonic, how ominous is the statement that ours
is: —

. ““The only Press in the world that has grown purer as it has
grown freer.”

and

‘The only Press in the world that has improved in its tone as it
has become cheaper.”

But the rising tide of the Yellow Press, though
it had left one little sand-heap unflooded, was
soon to sweep even this away. The sinister warn-
ing in that word only should have been better
heeded and guarded against.

In 1909 appeared J. B. Fagan’s play The
Earth, and in 1910, Arnold Bennett's What
the Public Wants; no one would deny that
these are both expert writers on the Press, but
how changed is the attitude with regard to the
confidence in the power and the will of the
public mind to choose the wholesome and the
refined !

_ 1 Tt is not easy, of course, to fix any date of a general deteriora-
tion, as the better minds are always dissatisfied with their own
generations. James Sully, writing of the stage as early as 1874,
says ‘‘ the theatre is abandoned to those who thirst for some new
horror, and are ready to gape in impotent wonder at every
cumbrous mechanical device for representing the unrepresentable,”
Sensation and Intuition, p. 312. The masses in these respects have
always been unsatisfactory. They are so still.
THE PRESS 45

The chief character speaks thus in Mr Bennett’s
play:

‘““ I've only got one principle. Give the public
what it wants. Don’t give the public what you
think it ought to want, or what you think would
be good for it; but what it actually does want
sie ps 21)

And the chief character speaks thus in Mr
Fagan’s play:

“You've got to write for the man in the street;
if he isn’t in the gutter he’s pretty near it. . . .
If you're a newspaper man, your business is
to sell news. If you want to sell moral lessons
—that’s the parson’s trade ’’ (pp. 38-9).

“ . .. All the good news in the world will not
sell a copy of the evening Press, whilst murder
never fails.?

The best defence of ‘ The Press’’ 1 am
acquainted with is that of Booker T. Washington
in the fourth chapter of his volume My Larger
Education.

(1) “To a very large extent the daily news-

1 “The newspaper proprietors give the public what it wants.
That is why they have succeeded. Broadly speaking, they find
that what the public wants is sport, divorces, crimes, and a tincture
of politics, made up of facile emotions, of which national vanities,
fears and hatreds are the most easily stimulated,” Sociological
Review, Vol. xiii., p. 133; Professor Hobhouse’s review of Bryce’s
Modern Democracy.

2 C. W. Saleeby, Zhe Eugenic Prospect, p. 88, 1921.
46 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

papers have merely taken up the work that was
formerly performed by the village gossip or by the
men who sat around in the village store, talked
politics and made public opinion.”

(2) But they do this work more responsibly.
““ What I know of the newspapers convinces me
that they do not print one-tenth of the reports that
are sent in to them.” The newspapers err but
less than individual gossips would.

(3) The newspaper ‘‘ represents the interest and
reflects the opinions and intelligence of the average
[person] in the community where the paper is
published *’ but it tends to represent ‘‘ the average
[person] at his [or her] worst’ rarely at the best
aspect. Because, presumably, this pleases the
newspaper reader.

(4) Newspapers are socially valuable because
they are, as it were, an improved reflection of
public opinion.

This may be a valid defence of ‘‘ The Press ”
but, it shows the mass mind in a still more lurid
light. If public opinion would be worse without
““ The Press ’ and its restraining influence; if with
growing popularity the tone of the representing
newspaper must correspondingly fall; if it is
popular to dwell on the worse rather than the
better aspects of human life, then it is self-evident
that a blind political trust in the masses is indeed
‘““ fool’s folly.”
THE PRESS 47

Here ends a dream, after two centuries of test-
ing, by the failure of many noble efforts. The
man and the woman of the street are near the
gutter in their tastes, like to read spiritual garbage,
and will have it. Bunyan’s human being with the
muck rake is not only true for his day but for ours.
It is not wholly ignorance but desire also which
makes people choose darkness rather than light.!
Yet Ebenezer Elliott, ‘‘ The Corn-Law Rhymer ”’
wrote only in the second quarter of the nineteenth
century—

“God said—‘ Let there be light’—
Grim darkness felt His High and fled i 2

*¢ ¢The Those? all lands shall sing ;
The Press, the Press we bring,
All lands to bless:
O pallid Want! O Labour stark!
Behold we bring the second ark !
The Press! the Press! the Press!”

I take the contents of a typical illustrated
paper which happens to be before me as I write.
It is published in the year 1916, and it has, so it
claims, a sale of more than two millions, and is,
therefore, read by five to ten million people. Here
are the contents: —

1st page: Sensational War Photographs of
no educative or informative value.

1 On other lines than circulation, the Press may recover its lost
prestige,
48 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

2nd page: Some War information, the grief of
a millionaire, a girl’s bridal trip, and a bishop"
who blames homes, etc.

3rd page: Real War News.

4th and 5th pages: Pages of popular writing.

6th and 7th pages: Pages of illustrated gossip.

8th and gth pages: Illustrated sensationalism.

A page of advertisements.

A page of musical comedy and theatrical danc-
ing revues.

A page of sensational ‘‘love-story’’ writing,
with three advertisements which disguise the truth.

A page of gossip about women.

The other page advertisements, all disguising
the truth, and sensational illustrations.

This analysis is much above not below the
ordinary level, for ugly divorce news, murder
and theft trials and prize-fighting, gambling and
racing are all absent, instead of filling as they
usually do, the prominent places.

But if Milton could come back, would he still
say:

‘‘ Liberty
. always with right reason dwells.”

Would Mr Pebody still write:

‘“ The tendency of the Press to-day is to enlist
all the intellectual forces of the nation in its
service ’’ as he wrote in 1882. :
THE PRESS 49

Would Elliott, a people’s poet, still think of the
Press as the dispeller of the people’s spiritual
darkness? Or would they say with Thackeray :

be . Vanitas vanitatum! . . . Come, children,
let us shut up the box and the puppets, for
our play is played out.”” (Conclusion to Vanity
Fair.)

It requires a stout heart still to believe in the
‘“ voice of the People ’’ after one has studied the
People’s Press, with its items of ‘‘ All the
Winners,” ‘‘ Race for the Jubilee,” ‘‘ The Great
Pight,” etc.

I will not illustrate how the modern theatre is
declining, how men like Henry Irving and Forbes
Robertson seem to have less and less chance as
the years go by. How even the music hall is
being killed by its still more sensational rival, the
cinema.

William Archer,! Granville Barker? and others
have schemes for the reversal of this tendency and
both are hopeful, but the same questions are
asked as Fagan and Bennett ask about ‘‘The
Press.”” Mr Barker’s plea for a special kind of
‘“ Exemplary Theatre ’ is that the standard of
success to-day is ‘‘ the power to attract the greatest
possible crowd in the shortest possible time,”

1 Art and the Commonweal, etc.
2 The Exemplary Theatre.
50 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

and this is admitted to have a degrading
influence.

Facts on which such conclusions are based can

be studied to-day by us all, and are patent on
(3

every ‘‘ publicity’ hoarding. Standards fall as
popularity rises.
CHAPTER VI

SOME EVIDENCE OF THE FAILURE OF MODERN
PSEUDO-DEMOCRACIES. THE READING PUBLIC

A Goop deal of the flamboyant optimism that is
met with to-day is due to the fact that most people
are ignorant of even the rudiments of scientific
method and do not think of the relative and actual
proportions of a problem. Books are a typical
example of this danger. A book may succeed
reasonably well if two thousand copies are sold in
a few months, but if the people who ought to buy
it are not two thousand but sixty or eighty thou-
sand, and, shall we say, one thousand eight
hundred and fifty copies are sold, although it may
not be a failure financially, the fact of its very
moderate success may be of quite sinister signi-
ficance. The question is not, therefore, when we
consider the democratic issue, whether a few
enthusiastic men and women can be got together
to listen to a good lecture, or will buy and read
a good class of book; it is, What proportion
are these of the class they belong to? If this is
51
52 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

not clearly recognised, the whole problem of
democracy will be misunderstood.

The Scottish popular education movement began
with Knox and was quickly extended, English
popular education began with the Nonconformist
Academies of the second half of the seventeenth
century, and the Conformist effort through *‘ The
Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowl-
edge,” and this society, when it was inaugurated,
expressed its opinion on the ‘‘ barbarous ignorance
of the common people.”’? It would take too long
to go into the history of these national movements,
but for more than two centuries in both countries,
general education as an aim has been before the
minds of the British people.

I will pass over many attempts that failed;
Robert Owen's effort to make intelligent citizens,
Dr John Aikin’s provision of really good popular
literature to reach the people; Knight's publica-
tion of the Penny Magazine and Chambers’
Information for the People, which were read by
professional classes, and to a limited extent only
by these, and not by the people as a whole;
all of these attempts were, one after another,
abandoned. I will not discuss the failure, except
in a few instances, of ‘‘ Working Men’s Col-
leges ’’ and ‘‘ Institutes,” because it was said that

1 du Important Chapter on English Church History, S.P.C.K.,
1698-1904, p. 4.
THE READING PUBLIC 53

the people were not ready, that the elementary
‘“ schools of the people’ not having been
universal the people were not prepared to appre-
ciate any kind of study. Such arguments were
terribly weak, they ignored the evidence that there
always was, as there still is, a positively gigantic
leakage in all educational work, and that there
was no effective relation between the educational
effort expended and the educational taste aroused.
But taking the special pleading for what it is
worth, and ignoring the thousands and thousands
who had been through voluntary schools and had
not become readers of any kind of solid literature,
the plea of the reality of a general popular demand
for mental life in any form has met its death-blow
in the work which has been done in England,
and other countries, during the last forty years,
since Board and County Schools have been
established.

The House of Cassell and Professor Henry
Morley deserve great credit for trying in the
eighties of last century, at a time when more than
a generation of people had been through the
schools, to provide the best literature at the modest
price of 3d. a paper volume and 44d. a cloth one.
This series would have succeeded even if the
middle classes had taken it up; it did not succeed
—though in a much more limited and expensive
form, it has not completely failed.
54 + SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

I will not go over the melancholy decline of
publishers’ catalogues, when publishers have
followed the course of the Press and sought
popularity, though the decadence is similar in
almost all respects.

But I will take another aspect. 1 have been in
a Tutorial Class Movement, which was perhaps
the most promising one in the world, where adult
students choose their own subjects, do not pay
the lecturers’ fees at all, but only about one penny
a lecture for hall accommodation, and where
everything is done to make the lectures attractive
by the tutors, who are of university standing or
its equivalent. I do not believe I exaggerate
when I claim that the proportion of such students
to the general population in a given locality is not
thirty-five to twenty thousand, though there has
been a fine enthusiasm in those who attended. It
is folly, indeed, to assert that there is a thirst for
education in the face of such incontestably strong
evidence to the contrary. And, speaking broadly,
Trades Unions will not support any form of real
education, though they will give sparingly to pro-
pagandist work that expresses their own economic
views. We need percentage figures in terms of
the whole general population of districts to show
what people will pay for cinema, theatre, fiction,
gambling, and outdoor amusements as compared
with real education.
=
x"

THE READING PUBLIC 55

It is when we try to think in these comparative
terms, and consider the money spent on alcohol
and narcotics; on unhealthy, and nearly always
sensational, forms of entertainment; on outdoor
sports and their betting accompaniments; on the
grosser forms of non-literary fiction; on education
which, while it is real, is taken up purely for
monetary reasons, and economic studies which are
mainly followed because of a personal cupidity
interest; it is when we weigh these lower human
activities on one side and the higher ones on the
other, that we see how little remains which can
be honestly called cultural. How can a people
rule itself wisely, when by far the majority of its
citizens do not spend, out of their money allotted
not to necessities but to recreation, one penny in
the pound on the higher life aims?

““ The Adult School ”’ and the better Brother-
hoods are a fine leaven in the people, but they are
a small, a very small proportion of the whole, and
these movements are not wholly independent and
wholly supported by the members themselves.

The living wage standard has long been passed
in many occupations in this country—in almost all
occupations before the war in Australia—and there
is little or no evidence of any moral or cultural
uplifting as a consequence, though there is a wider
and wider prevalence of gambling and neo-
malthusian and other doubtful tendencies.
56 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

When during the war, allotments of land were
granted in parks, and in fields directly overlooking
some of the finest of English sea-coast scenery,
no attempt was made to prevent disfigurement of
the landscape. A chicken-run would be put up
and an old perambulator, a pail with bricks in it
or some other makeshift would be used to keep the
top from being blown away when a few nails would
have made the whole more presentable; and the
study of any park after a bank holiday with its
litter and the trampled-down flower beds is enough
to give a lover of humanity the heartache. Where
is even the beginnings of the aesthetic in such men
and women? I will refer to one last general head
which may be covered by the word,

‘‘ QUACKERY.”

Bald-headed chemists sell quantities of hair
restorers, and it is of no consequence to their sales
that they are bald-headed themselves. And a
study of the foolishness of the ordinary advertise-
ment columns of newspapers gives ample testimony
of the truth of this assertion.

A writer in a good-class Sunday paper* speaks of
a concert where three pieces were badly played, yet
“ won such a round of applause as compelled an
encore.”’ Another writer in a daily paper of good
standing writes ‘‘ These hysterical sentences show

1 The Observer, 8.5.21.
THE READING PUBLIC 57

how impossible it is to issue a spirited manifesto
to the workers in all lands which shall bear any
relation to the truth.’”’® Another writer, and I take
these references quite at random, says ‘‘ genuine
lovers of reading . . . stand aghast at the morbid-
ity of many modern publications.” We are told
of a certain Medical Association made up of
““ Wizards, soothsayers, cure-alls, herb-doctors,
advertising doctors and irregulars,’”’ and it was
reported® of a certain wife who had been “a
Spiritist,”” ‘* an Economite,”” ‘‘ a Mesmerist Mind-
reader,” ‘‘a Fortune-teller,”” ‘‘a Christian
Scientist,”’ *“ a Theosophist,”” ‘‘ a New Thought,”
‘“ a Reformed Anabaptist,” ‘‘ an Angel Dance,”
and a ‘‘ Numerological,”” all in a few months,
that she was more than her husband could
tolerate. _

Dr Edwin Hatch* says ‘‘ an ill-informed writer
may state almost any propositions he pleases, with
the certainty of finding listeners; a well-informed
writer may state propositions which are as demon-
strably true as any historical proposition can be,
with the certainty of being contradicted.” Sir
Frederick Mott addressing the Medico-Psycho-
logical Society, in June, 1921, spoke of ** a certain
class of people whose minds are open to any sug-
gestive influence, and are ever ready to run after

1 Daily Telegraph, 2.5.21. 2 Inguirer, 7.5.21.
? Daily Telegraph, 11.5.21. 4 Hibbert Lectures, p. 15, 1888.
58 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

any new craze, good or bad.”” All this is part of
the democratic difficulty.

Every year now when the streets are tarred, one
may see men and women, who are obviously fond
of their dogs, go out, without leading them, though
large municipal notices are put up, ‘‘ Beware of
the Tar.”” They will even cross a road and take
no pains to save their dog’s feet. They know that
tar is sticky, they know that tar in their houses
makes marks on oil cloth and carpet, they know
that the dogs will, when they get home, lick and
fidget with their paws until they often ‘‘ worry ”’
sore places on them. It makes no difference,
every year the same performance is repeated. The
battle over the use of a baby’s dummy is another
of these sheer imbecilities which are yet more than
imbecilities, for people are not so unintelligent as
these facts would imply. In these and similar
cases there must be emotional factors which numb
the intelligence.

George Swinnock, one of the great Puritan
Divines, said, wittily and truly, nearly two and a
half centuries ago, that we often behave like ‘ a
silly hen, which though much good corn lie before
_ her, takes little notice of it, but still scrapes on the
earth.”’!

One sees a different aspect of this problem in all
committee work. Miss Savill, a high school head-

1 James Nichol, Works, Vol. i., p. 71, 1868.
THE READING PUBLIC 59

mistress, made a commonly confirmed statement
at a conference recently! when she said ‘the
formal working on a committee sometimes seemed
to induce a certain mental atrophy in those who
embarked upon it.”’ This is not only true of all
committee work, it is true of nearly every kind of
official duty, which in the end becomes cautious,
non-committal and colourless.

The whole problem of democracy is beset with
this kind of difficulty, even down to the question
of one person one vote. There are many glowing
passages in literature on the dignity of voting and
the ballot box, and some are in fairly good second-
class poetry, but Rudyard Kipling’s description is
nearer to the cold hard reality.? The man voter,
and it is now a woman too—

‘“ May not know how to run his own business
. . . may be pauper, half-crazed with drink, bank-
rupt, dissolute, or merely a born fool, but he has
a vote.”’

This seems to have been the view of the great
jurisprudist, John Austin. His wife says of him :
‘“ The idea of popular legislation was to him as
alarming as it was absurd, and it was precisely on
account of the disastrous consequences which he
was certain must result from it to the people them-

selves, that he felt indignant at the uses made of

1 Times Educational Supplement, 18.6.21. ‘“Head Mistresses
Conference.”
2 From Sea to Sea, 24th Chapter,
60 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

their ignorance, and the unmanly affectation of
deference to their wishes by those whose duty it
is to enlighten and guide them ’’ (Preface, Austin
on Jurisprudence). He seems to have desired as
Socrates did the same responsibility and advisory
skill in the politician as in other callings.

If one watches how Sunday is being spent, how
the greater and sublimer parts of life are being
steadily neglected, we get ample data for question-
ing how far pseudo-democracy is or is not good
and is or is not a true social benefit.

It may be that in all ages, masses of men and
women have shown these common characteristics—
the masses of both sexes and all classes and occupa-
tions—history makes this assumption all but
certain, but the point is that now at this moment
of history, the human race is committed to a full
democratic ideal, and if some voices are heard, and
these not the least intelligent, calling ‘‘ Watch-
man, what of the Night? ’’ there is a real warning
in their call.

An able article in The Times Literary Supple-
ment speaks of the higher appeals, which Pro-
fessor Gilbert Murray has made to peoples gener-
ally, and adds ‘‘ But what if the appeal fails?
What if when the appeal is made to the democracy,
right and reason do not prevail? >> This is the
great, the supreme issue, and it makes men like

1 28th April, 1921.
THE READING PUBLIC 61

Gissing, Lecky, Graham Wallas and Bryce feel
more than a shiver of uncertainty. Have we lost
our way?

And The Times writer continues, ‘‘ Supposing
things go wrong, supposing the evil forces of
passion and avarice and egotism and hatred
threaten to become too strong,’’ will men be found
to stand like lions in the path to check retrogres-
sion? Was Christ right when he pictured men
and women as sheep needing a shepherd, as want-
ing a real leader not a mere representative ?

It is questions such as these that make the old
dreamlike words of Milton’s Areopagitica and his
‘‘ easy ways to establish commonwealths ’’ seem
so far distant and muffled in their appeal to us.
And it is questions such as these that force us to
feel that a crowd study based on an individual
study of the human mind is a vital, an urgent, a
fundamental need of our times. And it is ques-
tions such as these that make us ask other greater
questions; what is real Democracy and on what
social theory, or theories, does it rest?
CHAPTER VII

THE BREAKDOWN OF THE RATIONALISTIC DEMOCRATIC
THEORY

IN considering a few of the sources of evidence
which explain the growing distrust felt for the
democratic appeal, I did not touch on another
source of this lack of confidence—a view which
sees the popular element as mainly a retrogressive
one whenever social improvements are sought to
be introduced. Professor White, in his interest-
ing volumes on the Warfare of Science with
Theology really demonstrates something else than
that which he sets out to prove, he demonstrates
that in theology the progressive factor is per-
secuted, and this is also Spencer’s and Draper’s
position; but in Science, Art, Music, Literature
and social reform it is also persecuted. Hadow,
for instance, speaking of the treatment of Hector
Berlioz, the musician, says: ‘‘ He had kept
every condition which officialism could impose,
every rule which pedantry could formulate, and

he lost his reward, not because his work was open
62
BREAKDOWN OF THEORY 63

to blame, but because there was not one of his
critics who had enough knowledge to under-
stand,”’! and he points out in study after study
how the critics misunderstood the genius. He
quotes with approval® Mendelssohn’s view of the
general public, ‘‘ so devoid of taste, so dependent
on the . . . so-called connoisseur.” Here is the
inevitable conclusion that meets the real student
everywhere. The more popular forces are almost
always ignorant and impeding forces which are
led by critics who are, as Hadow says, officialised
and formalised and almost as ignorant and imped-
ing, and are yet supported by those they lead in
their adherence to ceremony and pedantry. So
that as Maudsley truly observes ‘‘ the faithful
study of human history would be calculated to
demoralise human nature ’’ but for ‘‘ the redeem-
ing instances of the few lives.””> It is not a
question therefore of the warfare of any particu-
lar -ology against science and its progress, the
depressing reality of history is that the forward
steps of the enlightened few tend to be resisted by
the mutable many. This is especially seen in
nearly all sanitary and hygienic reforms which
are resisted by the many in all classes and both
sexes. Now in face of this mass ignorance, this

1 W. H. Hadow, Studies in Modern Music, p. 90. First series,
1905.

2 Jbid., p. 303.

3 Last paragraph Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings.
64 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

ignorance which will always relatively, and per-
haps actually, exist and impede progress, it seems
strange, beyond all words to express and all logic
to explain, to found a theory of government solely
upon this impeding power.

It is said that voting power makes men and
women responsible, but there is not the slightest
evidence that even political leaders, to say nothing
of the rank and file, ever equip themselves by the
study of their subject to induce the voter to vote
more wisely, and there is no evidence that the
voter feels a responsibility for which his or her
leader sees no necessity.! Indeed, the appeal to
the indiscriminating or even the discriminating
many, cannot be on any ground of knowledge,
because as Mandell Creighton? points out in regard
to books (and it is true universally) the more
skilled and learned the treatment, the smaller is
the circle that is likely to be reached. And this
was also the opinion of men with such wide mass
knowledge and experience of teaching as Pro-
fessor Huxley. Not only so, but Mazzini claimed
more than once that it is duties, not rights, which
encourage responsibility whereas representation
favours rights rather than duties. The above is

1 Even such a leader as Gladstone, for instance, always appealed
to one side of the issue and to party feelings. A leader who is not
partisan is almost inconceivable.

2 Historical Lectures and Addresses, p. 26, 1904.
BREAKDOWN OF THEORY 63

said as expressing the exigencies of the situation,
not to disparage politicians.

Now it may be urged that anyone can talk and
vote on ‘‘ Politics,”’ because politics is a subject
which is everybody’s affair and is within every-
body’s experience, but the best minds are agreed
that social problems are at least as difficult as any
other scientific ones, and Comte thought them
more difficult because of the complexity of the
subject itself, and Spencer more difficult because
of the prejudices which the subject arouses, and
Huxley more difficult because this science of
politics has for its ideal our own destiny and we
can never know what that destiny is. Therefore,
it seems certain that in this subject, if anywhere,
the utmost skilled information is required by the
‘many, the majority, if democracy is to succeed.
But this majority has hitherto been necessarily an
impeding and ignorant power, disinclined to rise
out of its ignorance. How then can the rule of
‘‘ the many ’ bring anything more than anarchy,
incompetence and disaster to the State? This
was apparently Aristotle’s attitude, and the outlook
is a far more difficult one to-day, when all our
social needs are much more complex, much more
technical, much more specialised, much vaster,
than when Aristotle thought and wrote. John
Austin held similar views. ‘‘ Profoundly con-
vinced as he was of the scarcity of great ability,

E
66 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

and of the still greater scarcity of a disinterested
love of truth, it may easily be imagined that he
regarded with a sort of horror all schemes for
placing the business of legislation in the hands of
large bodies of men ’’ (Preface, Austin on Juris-
prudence). Let us, therefore, examine a few of
the new theories which seek to justify the demo-
cratic standpoint, but before doing so, let us
realise what these theories need to explain.

3»

THE FIRST ESSENTIAL

Now in considering the claim of democracy, it
must be insisted upon that this claim rests on the
assumption that the wider the franchise the more
direct the control of the state by the whole people,
the better will be the nature of the government.

But if one looks critically, soberly and dis-
passionately at this claim, one sees that it must
assume that there is an obscure transformation
principle at work. There is no doubt about this,
as the study of the multitude is one which can
be made by anyone, and its features are visible
everywhere. Mr Anstey in his Voces Populi
humorously describes people at a ‘‘ Conjuror’s,”
““ In an Omnibus,” * At the Royal Academy,”
#4 At a Dance,” “A Row in the Pit” of a
theatre, ‘‘ At a Music Hall.’ One of his best
sketches is on ‘‘ Bank Holiday.” It is more
serious studies of this kind that we must, how-
BREAKDOWN OF THEORY 67

ever, keep in mind. ‘‘' The Public House ”’ in
England and what was the Saloon in America,
and their counterparts in other countries, why do
they attract? Political Clubs and Meetings, why
is it their characteristics are so one-sided and
sometimes too convivial? The typical smoking-
concert, why does it lean to vulgarity just as the
Music Hall and the Cinema do? What is the
meaning of the inanity, the sensationalism and
the absence of truth in the ordinary advertisement,
and why does it pay to advertise in this manner?
Why does gambling figure so largely in all forms
of spectacular sports? Why do popular preachers
and lecturers season their thoughts so constantly
with unfitting jokes? Why is it that fiction, and
that generally in the form of the °‘‘shilling
shocker ”’ or ‘‘ the penny dreadful,” is the chief
source of popular reading after the sensational
Press? What is the source of street curiosity and
of the interest in ‘‘ Tub’ oratory? And what is
the intelligence and morality of many tradesmen
and even professional men, seen in the desire for
novelties which often are tried but not tested,
revealing such men as first cousins to quacks, and
why is it that O. W. Holmes’ satire is, at least,
near the truth:
“When legislators keep the law,
When banks dispense with bolts and locks,

When berries—whortle, rasp and straw—
Grow bigger downwards through the box,
68 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

When he that selleth house or land,
Shows leak in roof, or flaw in right,

When haberdashers choose the stand
Whose window hath the broadest light.

When preachers tell us what they think,
And party leaders what they mean—

7%// then let Cumming blaze away,
And Miller's saints blow up the globe ;
But when you see that blessed day,
Then order your ascension robe!”
(From ‘Latter-day Warnings”).

This is humorous, but it is nearer to the heart
of the problem than the sentimental talk that
once was pleasing ‘‘ about the multitude’s aching
breast ’’ or ‘‘ yearning souls bound down by
slavery’s economic chains,” and about ‘thrills
of joy that run prophetic trembling on from East
to West,” and of ‘“ Woman’s universal mother-
hood,” etc.! These less pleasant characteristics
of most men and women are what made Gissing
feel abhorrence when he contemplated them as
multitudes. But democracy must transform such
weaknesses if it is to succeed.

It would not be true, however, to think too ill
of either ourselves or our fellow-men and women;
the old contempt for the multitude was as silly as
last century's sentimentality. There is a trust-
worthiness in the ordinary man, and the broad

1 It has been suggested to me that ‘‘ Prohibition” in the United
States shows a reverse tendency; it may be so, if there goes with
it a moral uplifting, and not abuses spreading to other fields, as
Shadwell suggests, in Spain and Turkey.
BREAKDOWN OF THEORY 69

reliability of all classes of workers in industry is
a reality far more impressive than it is usually
considered to be. That, on the whole, we can
depend on all car and rail drivers and our sailors
on the sea as implicitly as we do, is a very remark-
able proof of reliability ; that food and clothing are
not more tampered with; that for the most part,
suspicion is as bad and silly an attitude as gulli-
bility, these are strong, weighty realities on the
credit side of humanity. But it is when we try to
build up a theory of government upon them that
the difficulties begin.

Given the general level of intelligence of what
is called the man and the woman of the street,
how can we assert that the wider the franchise, the
more direct the control, the better will be the
nature of the government? No observation, not
a single one, scientifically interpreted, of the
multitude of men and women justifies this extra-
ordinary optimism, and therefore all the best
modern democratic views rest on the assumption of
a transformation which takes place when men and
women are considered in the mass or acting
together as distinct from singly; this implies the
abandonment of the simple view and is the first
essential.

THE SECOND ESSENTIAL

It may be said that such conclusions are
vo SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

extremely depressing; that even if true, there can
be no use in dwelling on this side of human
nature; that all educational efforts will suffer if it
is once recognised how little mankind profits from
such efforts; that religious appeals will cease if it
is known that the many lives in all ages and climes
have been so unsatisfactory; that even the pursuit
of science and truth will be abandoned if it is
accepted that intellectual capacity is commonly
perverted by feelings of all kinds, such as family
affections, or the ambitions arising out of lust of
power, seniority and self-seeking. This is not so,
however; Shakespeare saw clearly and accurately
that it is the unworthy and incompetent view of
mankind, both personal and social, which sees
only the obvious and superficial in human motives;
that to see life too simply is, in fact, to see it both
meanly and falsely; we need not, therefore, fear
a critical examination of the data upon which the
claims for social reform are based.

The complexity of human nature and of human
affairs demands a less immature view for their
comprehension, and the new psychological and
biological attitudes are the beginnings of an
attempt to sense mind from a larger standpoint.
On the human horizon we are probably near a
change as tremendous as that which helped Kepler
and Newton to get away from the conception
of ‘‘ canopy,” ‘‘ o’erhanging firmament,”” ‘‘ this
i

BREAKDOWN OF THEORY 71

majestical roof ’’ as descriptions of the vast
immensity called sky, so that the problems of
astronomic space could be better appreciated, or
like another change which Lyell laid bare by the
discovery of the stupendous antiquity of Time.

Such an expansion of spiritual vision should
not excite apprehension, but it should help us
all to realise that the first essential in modern
political study is the abandonment of the simple
confined prospect and the realisation of indirect
processes at work, and that the second essential is
the recognition that by this abandonment we step
out into unfamiliar scenery and need new charts
and sign-posts to discover our whereabouts, which
before, from our previous limitations, were not
required.

Hitherto ‘‘the making of nations’ has been
looked upon in much the same simple way as the
making by a carpenter of a piece of furniture,
namely, as a plain matter of obvious human con-
trivance, but what is now coming to be realised,
however dimly as yet, is the presence of a distant
background region of Natural Law which lies
behind and governs the tiny foreground of per-
sonal and social human effort to which we have
all been used. It is this distant background which
gives to the gaze of the modern student the recog-
nition of huge regions as yet untrodden to which
our own past studies have been little more than a
72 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

very obvious and not altogether trustworthy fore-
court of inquiry.

The new ground is broken when we once realise
this, and it will be found on inquiry that for
nearly two to three hundred years this governing
background, itself perhaps the scientific heir of the
older Providentialism, has been increasingly recog-
nised. Great students saw and see, like Moni-
esquieu, a ‘‘ Spirit of Laws ’’ which is behind the
human legislators though they know it not; like
Maine, they see an Ancient Law which reveals and
determines modern law; like Vico, a Providence
which works through men’s and women’s actions;
like Comte and Spencer, stages of culture and laws
of progress; like Hegel, a Real Will behind our
transient impulses ; like Gladstone, a purpose which
is behind the endless, wordy, and often seemingly
meaningless, political contentiousness of men and
women, directing society towards something better
than this contentiousness; like Kipling, a far-call
of empires and, perhaps, of personal human life
which gives dignity and value to what often seems
undignified and valueless. Once catch this vision
and the teaching of Bentham and other rational-
ists, however useful and practical this teaching
may be for the moment, shrinks before one’s
mind’s eye to very insignificant proportions and
never afterwards regains its magnitude.

Once clearly realise the complexities of our own

3
BREAKDOWN OF THEORY 73

human natures and their resulting frailties, and
that our minds are not less but greater because
of them; once realise that society because of these
multiform social interactions depends on natural
laws rather than human intriguing and endeav-
ours, and instead of depression a new vigour is
given us, because human issues are raised to a
more than human horizon. We pass from the
social nursery into the great arena of social life
and know that as there are courses for the stars
and planets, evolution in life-forms up to man, so
even in human history there are majestic cosmic
fulfilments.

It is unavoidable that with this shrinkage of the
old view, simple claims that the education of
humanity will make men and women rational;
that giving every adult human creature a vote
will reform the world; or that the payment of a
living wage or the raising of the school age, or
both together, will make men act wisely and
honourably for ever more; these simple claims
cease to fascinate us, and all utopian dreams seem
at once chimerical, and the old political theorist
of the Mill and Mazzini schools is thus separated
from the new by almost the widest and most
unbridgeable of gulfs; but the point is, that in this
new and very much wider outlook, old boundaries
have to be cast away and new paths, new land-
marks, milestones and sign-posts have to be set up.
24 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

As examples of this new position, I can only
touch upon Rousseau’s, Hegel’s and Gladstone’s
teachings, as their views lead naturally to crowd
investigations and principles, and help us to realise
the path on which Modern Democracy may be
started, but even in these examples the simple
old-fashioned prospect is left behind and the un-
familiar, with all its strangeness and yet absorb-
ing interest, is before us.

APPENDIX

Difficulties, which a democratic theory of popular
government must meet. Compiled from
Austin’s ““ Jurisprudence.”’ Second Edition.

Mr Austin is really much nearer to those who
have given up rationalism as the basis of govern-
ment, than he was himself aware of. Although
admiring Locke and Bentham, he sees the difficulty
of popular appeal far more clearly than they do.
He claims ‘‘ that the ignorance of the multitude
is not altogether invincible *’; that ‘‘ the multitude
might clearly understand the elements or ground-
work of the science [of Ethics] together with the
more momentous of the derivative practical truths.
To that extent they might be freed from the
dominion of authority; from the necessity of
BREAKDOWN OF THEORY 75

blindly persisting in hereditary opinions and
practices; or of turning and veering, for waht of
directing principles, with every wind of doctrine.’’*
This is not a very hopeful basis for a democratic
theory, but his wife adds® in a note: *‘ The experi-
ence of the thirty years which have elapsed since
the foregoing lecture was written does not seem
to justify the author’s sanguine anticipation of the
effects of the spread of education among the
people.” This note was written in 1861, it is even
more true in 1922. It is here claimed that Mr
Austin would almost certainly have abandoned his
rationalistic position were he living now, and that
what he concedes is virtually Gladstone’s attitude,
to be considered later, and that no rationalistic
theory of democracy could be founded on the
summary of Mr Austin’s position given below.

1. Individual Influence Almost Negligible.
#$ The powers of single individuals are feeble and
poor, though the powers of conspiring numbers
are gigantic.’’?

Comment. Mr Austin here refers to the ordin-
ary man, not the genius and talented man ; see the
next point. The above was written in 1832, but the
vast trade combines and trusts and workers’ trade
unions, as well as all large-scale production, have
shown that the power of the single individual is
declining even more than he contemplated.

1 P, 65.6. 2 P. 74. 5: P. 450,
v6 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

2. The Small Mental Capacity of the Citizen.
Austin’s ‘‘ estimate of men was low.” :

‘“ He had followed, step by step, the progress
of the great minds by which systems of law had
been, through ages, slowly and painfully elabor-
ated; and the project of submitting these highest
products of the human intellect, or the difficult
problems they deal with, to the judgment and the
handling of uneducated masses, seemed to him a
return to barbarism.’’!

Comment. In this also, Austin was before his
time, as recent observations and psychological tests
show. The mental capacity of the ordinary citizen
appears to be not much above a fourteen-year-old
standard. See Binet-Simon literature in France,
America and Great Britain.

3. The Unreliability of Knowledge. *‘ Little of
any man’s knowledge is gotten by original
research. It mostly consists of results . . . taken
upon testimony.’’*

4. Prejudice and Bias.

(a) In leaders of men.

Sinister interests or prejudices begotten by
such interests are the driving motives of most
popular leaders of men who are ‘‘ advocates rather
than inquirers.’’®

(b) The ignorance of the led.

1 Pp. xxix. and xxx. 2p. 156, 3P 57
BREAKDOWN OF THEORY 77

““ Now how can the bulk of mankind who have
little opportunity for research compare the respec-
tive merits of these varying and hostile opinions.’"!

‘“ But those numerous classes of the community
were commonly too coarse and ignorant to care
for books '’? of a socially informing character.

(c) Even the writer is untrustworthy.

Such authors, depending on a few influential
critics and a narrow range of readers, know *‘ that
a fraction of the community can make or mar
their reputation, they unconsciously or purposely
accommodate their conclusions to the prejudices
of that narrower public. Or, to borrow the
expressive language of this greatest and best of
philosophers [John Locke] ‘they begin with
espousing the well-endowed opinions in fashion;
and, then, seek arguments to show their beauty,
or to varnish and disguise their deformity.’ ”’?

(d) All minds are perverted by their particular
social situations.

‘“ For every man’s public is formed of his own
class : of those with whom he associates : of those
whose favourable or unfavourable opinion sweetens
or imbitters his life.’

If these positions that Mr Austin thus main-
tains as being representative of social opinion are
even approximately true, it is clear that no theory

1P 57 2 p. 69.
3 Pp, 6S. 4. P.63
v8 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

of popular or even any form of government, which
rests directly on the conscious intelligence of a
people, or of a class, is possible. If popular or
class governments are successful in spite of the
above-mentioned drawbacks, it must be because of
some indirect social laws which transmute such
desire-governed opinions and tendencies into more
impartial and scientific fulfilments. New and
less elementary theories are therefore required to
explain social activity.
PART UI

NEW THEORIES OF POPULAR
GOVERNMENT
 
CHAPTER Vii}

THE NEW POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE OF ROUSSEAU,
HEGEL AND GLADSTONE

THE peculiarity of Rousseau’s, Hegel’s and Glad-
stone’s views of society is that they seek a general
subordinating principle which while it dominates
the individual wills yet harmonises them. It is
not, however, that this power destroys each
individual will, but rather that in the collective
ensemble all are transformed. Each writer recog-
nises that the opinions of the typical citizen, per-
haps of any citizen, are insufficient for the task
asked of them. That besides the belief that each
member of a community feels that his or her
opinion directly counts—a belief which is largely
erroneous—there is an unconscious role for this
personal opinion which is of real, though indirect,
value as it helps to form a social will which is
superior to the different wills which compose it.
Rousseau’s general will does not necessarily
assume any power higher than man, it simply
suggests that man’s collective intelligence is
81 F
82 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

superior to his particular intelligence, but Hegel
and Gladstone do assume that either in some
absolute reality or some Providence there is a
greater power than the powers of individual men
and women directing human destiny.

Thomas Huxley’s mind, as anyone may realise
who studies his writings, was, like Matthew
Arnold’s, torn between the attraction of two con-
flicting yet interacting tendencies: (1) a natural
process which often bewildered, sometimes horrified
and as often inspired him; (2) a human process
which he felt he understood, and sometimes set
above nature in claiming it to be ethical, and some-
times below nature in having both insufficient power
and intelligence. Yet there was almost always an
undercurrent which caused him to feel that human
effort must always be subservient to natural law,
and this subservience was often accepted with an
exultant joy.

There are a great many passages in Huxley's
works which assume the insufficiency of men and
women to organise their own social life. Huxley’s
claim, that man, if he obeys nature's laws, can
be a master gardener to the plants and animals
which he cultivates, because he knows what kinds
of plants and animals he requires, but that he“can
never be a master gardener to himself because he
cannot rise above his nature and see what is
needed, is a striking admission. In another place
NEW POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE 83

he compares social life to a game of chess, in which
opposite to each man and woman is the Almighty
Player of nature, and in his letters to Kingsley,
many passages come very close indeed to the full
acceptance of a providential guidance. To under-
stand our social and personal destinies, therefore,
an attempt must be made to reach this real con-
trolling power, and hence the interpretation of it
is a matter of first importance. Hegel and Glad-
stone, like Vico, both appeared to recognise to the
full the inadequacy of individual man’s own ambi-
tions and even intelligence (as who does not who
reads human history attentively), they felt like the
old Stoics that we are actors in a drama, the great-
ness of which will always be super-human, and
that we must act the parts given to us, but they
were unlike them in that they sought the Master
Dramatist’s instructions.

This search for the Master Gardener’s or the
Master Dramatist’s teachings, and the assumption
that these teachings are of much greater theoretical,
and even practical, importance than our own
human speculations, brings the study of society
into line with other sciences, since instead of trying
first to make social laws of our own regardless of
scientific social ones, we do as the astronomer and
the biologist do, we first study Nature's laws and
then) and not until then, strive to work within the
limits of the sphere that Nature informs us are the
84 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

real and true ones. To see ourselves thus objec-
tively is what, whether they knew it or not, Hegel
and Gladstone strove to help us to realise.

This aspect may be reached from another, and
simply personal, approach. Adelaide Proctor’s
words in The Lost Chord almost certainly owe
their popularity to the general expression of a very
common personal experience which is reached in
middle life, when actual knowledge of human
affairs has taught us—if we are capable of learning
and many are not—that life is not so simple as we
think it to be in youth. We are tired, over-
burdened with circumstance and ill at ease; and we
begin to feel we have lost our ambitions and have
nothing to put in their places; conditions are awry
with us, and out of this discordance we strive to
find some distant harmonious echo, a message, a
social harmony in life, which we may not at first
have heard, because we have been too much like
members of an orchestra who are too intent on
their own parts and do not sufficiently notice the
general orchestral effect. A more commonplace
description of the same mental experience is given
when we say we cannot see the wood for the trees.
Politicians, as well as private citizens, have hitherto
heard only the several parts in the orchestra, they
have never tried to discover the effect the whole
social orchestra was producing; they have studied
the relation of different trees to each other, they
NEW POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE 85

have not tried to find out what the shape of the
whole wood is. To strive thus to detach oneself
and see more adequately is the object of the most
intelligent social theorists.

This view is not only reached by the politician,
and from a personal experience of human affairs
by all of us, it is seen also by the modern psycho-
logical social student. He sees a very large field
of human consciousness and the resulting social
activity as just a blind following of desire; as
pigeons associate with pigeons, rather than with
rooks or starlings because of common food aims
and similarity of habits of flight, etc., so men and
women associate and form their social life on a
common behaviourism of desire which has almost
nothing to do with thought. When these desires
conflict, biases are aroused and irrational likes and
dislikes are manifested. © Why do these desires
which are so complex and wayward, seemingly so
incalculable, not result in social chaos?

He sees there is the power of social convention
and that to some extent conventions and laws grow
out of a real teaching of experience, a social educa-
tive inheritance, scientifically measurable, and in
this inheritance geographic, industrial and trading
experiences as well as those of manners and polite-
ness all play their part. But looking dispassion-
ately at this conventional side of life, its logical
absurdities seen in dress, food, work and courtesies,
86 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

in medical quackery, sensationalism and irrespon-
sible as well as responsible emotion and thought,
it will be seen that they probably far outweigh, or
at least equal, the really profitable power of
custom. And though such absurdities no doubt
have psychological significance, yet it is not a
rational significance. Why, therefore, is conven-
tionalism on the whole a law-making influence and
not a chaotic one?

Accepting, what some authorities would deny,
the reality of conscience with its intuitive morality
as an uplifting force of our minds, it seems certain
that its teaching, while it has a general common
trend, is yet so individual in its application as to
lead to diversity rather than conformity of ethical
action. What power is it, therefore, other than
conscience which persistently works in the direction
of a mational, international and human moral
solidarity 2

And more difficult question still, what aggregat-
ing, transcendent harmonising influence is it
which gives some unity of achievement to all of
these activities, to wayward desire, ever-changing
and often grotesque fashion, and conscience with
its individual appeal ?

These are questions the modern psychological
student asks and finds no solution in rationalism.

Jeremy Taylor would have replied, *‘ The divine
gift of human reason,” but the study of human
NEW POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE. 3%

history shows that dispassionate unbiassed thought
is of the utmost rarity, and that the little thought
there is in the world is for the most part grossly
sophisticated and partisan, and is the desire-driven
tool of men’s and women’s, as well as children’s,
inclinations and not their disinterested guide.
What then are the forces which, in spite of counter
tendencies, on the whole are powerful enough to
be ascendant civilising instruments? The social
student who looks at human life spectacularly as a
detached but sympathetic scientific inquirer seems
compelled to conclude that there are as powerful
natural social laws, not yet discovered, which
govern human society, as there are natural physical
and biological laws which govern what is possibly
wrongly called ‘‘ inert matter
active processes of life.

From the ‘ contract’ teaching of Locke to
Bentham, the trend of inquiry has been to find the
motives of social evolution within the self-conscious
activities of man; this is what the ordinary
politician and private citizen still seek.

From Montesquieu and Blackstone to the most
recent crowd psychologists the tendency is, while
not ignoring this self-directing power of man, to
seek for dominating natural social laws outside
of and controlling man’s self-conscious activities.
These two schools have at present no common
meeting ground. The naturalistic and ascendant

”

and the obviously
$8 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

school of social students finding all self-guiding
and self-reasoning processes of men and women
quite inadequate to explain the social order, looks
for some principle above man’s intelligence and
mental capacity to explain why human society
exists and evolves. Rousseau, in spite of his
fallacious belief in the social contract origin of
society, yet felt this need and was the first explorer
of a new and vast domain.
CHAPTER IX
ROUSSEAU’S GENERAL AND OTHER SOCIAL WILLS

ROUSSEAU, as all students know, did not discipline
his mind, and, except in his teaching of a general
will, his outlook was not original. He borrowed
very extensively from Locke, and often perverted
his teaching; from other British and Continental
writers, and he often took no trouble to harmonise
quite contradictory borrowings.

Rousseau, in his ‘‘ social contract ’’ theories,
belongs to the old political school; in his doctrine
of social wills, as distinct from, but growing out
of personal wills, he is a pioneer of the new. He
faced both West and East indiscriminately and did
not ask if his action was inconsistent. He is not
alone in this inconsistency, he was and is popular
because of it. But his pitfall must be noticed and
avoided.

To a restrained and disciplined mind, like
that of Socrates’ or Locke’s, an intelligently
arranged, concensus government growing out of

89
go SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

the rationally guided wills of its citizens, was
easily imaginable and not improbable; to a mind
like Rousseau’s, only a little less intelligent but
undisciplined, wilful and wayward, full of whims
and vagaries, such a dream, probably even from
his first thoughts on the subject would have been
rejected as impossible, because in this respect
Rousseau’s mind was far nearer than that of
Socrates and Locke to the ordinary man’s and
woman’s with their impulse activity. In any case,
Rousseau seems to have been the first who saw the
necessity for some supra-personal socially govern-
ing principle.

Hobbes, like many other political writers,
believed that some kind of autocratic power is
necessary in order for government to exist at all,
and Locke was, perhaps, the first exponent of a
democratic policy. But Locke’s democracy was a
moral acceptance by the many of an intelligence
which came from the governing few, not an intelli-
gence of the many directing a policy which was
only carried out by the representing few. Rous-
seau neither accepted the intelligence of the few nor
of the many, and, while he followed Locke's
democratic impulse, he discovered another principle
of guidance which he thought would allow the
people as a whole to rule without their conflicting
desires wrecking the State. Rousseau appears to
have been the first to see clearly, though he does
ROUSSEAU’S WILLS 91

not always distinguish them clearly, that there are
four modes of human action in society involving
four types of intelligence, and yet all four arising
quite naturally out of the ordinary human mind.
There is the particular will of the individual.
Rousseau had an adequate appreciation of the fact
that this particular will is subject to selfish desires
of an anti-social character and to impulses which
are so blind and almost incalculable because of
their unreasonableness and unreliability that they
can neither be inferred by logic nor predicted by
science and are very unlikely to arrive at workable
concordats by any simple processes of addition.
But he also realised that there is what may be
called an institutional will, which, whenever a
public body is elected for a given purpose, tends
to act as a unity and that its activities are likely to
be different from the wishes of any single member
of that body. He realised that, what to-day would
be called team work and team intelligence, is not
the same kind of work or intelligence as the work
or the intelligence of the several members of that
team; that how people act together is a different
problem from the simpler one of how they act
separately. He also believed that the general will
of numbers is not simply an addition will, that
numbers moderate excessive demands of dominant
members and that where numbers exist, disin-
terested influences predominate and, as he thought,
92 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

natural goodness of humanity asserts itself. In
all this, Rousseau was something of a pioneer as
also in his insistence on the inborn natural healthi-
ness of the human mind (though he confused
together the healthy and the primitive).

In his realisation that society is confronted with
(1) particular, (2) institutional or team, (3) general
and (4) addition, he may with some justice be called
a kind of unconscious godfather of the science of
sociology, as it is the grouping tendencies of
human beings that is the central concern of this
science; and such problems need a careful psycho-
logical study which perhaps this century may take
in hand.

Rousseau was, however, ‘‘ speaking as a fool,”
in the Pauline sense, when he claimed that institu-
tional or team and general wills are capable of
giving society an elevated disinterested govern-
ment. He made, in fact, egregious omissions in
his assumptions. He never asked What kind of
leadership a typical general assembly of people
tends to tolerate? How the appeal of intelligence
is altered and this not for the better but for the
worse, by its being a general and not a specialist
assembly? How to keep the intelligence of a
specialist grouping and yet avoid its partisanship ?
These were questions that were probably not even
seen by the Franco-Swiss thinker. In particular
he ignored the stimulus to the already strong
ROUSSEAU’S WILLS 03

personal tendencies of sensationalism and lust of
power which the mere bringing of people together
arouses, and missed also the counterpoise of the
effect of non-democratic influences in favouring
individuality of mind and meditation, without
which true thought and deep feeling are well-nigh
impossible; while he failed to realise that awful
indifference, that inborn turpitude and ineptitude
of the many, that spiritual inertia which combined
with the deadening effect of custom daunts the
spirit of the bravest and most intelligent reformer
when he once faces it. Bentham and Austin seem
to have had similar fallacious dreams when they
wrote of general happiness, utility or good ideals,
which do not coincide with each other, and if they
did, have no general embodiment.

Sir John Simon in his classic Reports relating
to The Sanitary Condition of the City of London,
p. 44, for the years 1849-52 says, ardent reformer
though he was, ‘‘ there do dwell whole hordes of
persons, who struggle so little in self-defence
against that which surrounds them, that they may
be considered almost indifferent to its existence,
or almost acclimated to endure its continuance,’’
and anyone who takes the trouble to read social
history carefully, and study men and women of
to-day will find that these whole hordes of indiffer-
ent men and women who acoept what they are used
to and reject what is not usual, are in all classes
94 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

and stations of life one of the most formidable
problems for all welfare workers and especially for
believers in democracy. Mr John Dunlop, a very
cautious and experienced observer of men and
women, remarks: ‘‘ In every community (that ever
I met with) there exists always a great mass of
inertia, stupidity and brutish appetite ’’ (W.
Logan, Early Heroes of the Temperance Reforma-
tion, p. 49). It would be easy to demonstrate how
widespread in Time, in national and class outlooks
is the evidence of the existence of a very large
majority of the population which is almost always
desire-governed and in many instances is imper-
vious to any desire but that which effects the self.
The seventh chapter of George Herbert's 4 Priest
to the Temple is a naked avowal of the many
inducements a preacher needs to fall back upon if
he would hope to catch the popular ear. The book
written about 1630 runs parallel with recent war
experiences in nearly all countries. Thus Neville
S. Talbot in Thoughts on Religion at the Front
(p. 10) states: ‘‘ There is a great heart in the
people. It is not a great mind.”” Intellect is here
meant. ‘‘ Englishmen [says Oswin Creighton,
Letters, p. 230] . . . do not think and never have
thought,” and he assumes French, Russians and
Germans do. But a study of international war
books shows that each country notes its own lack.
The comparative scholarliness of Germany is not
Se

ROUSSEAU’S WILLS 05

disputed, yet Dr Muehlon in his Diary speaks of
the *‘ thoughtless stupidity,” *‘ the victims of their
craving for sensation,’ as describing the attitude
of the ordinary individual of all classes, while
Barbusse in Under Fire shows like qualities for
the French. I suggest that in peace and war those
qualities are always there and have been strangely
overlooked in political theory. Rousseau looked at
human nature through ‘‘ roseate ’’ tinted glasses;
he, like the ‘‘ New England Poets ”’ did not dare
to see men and women as they really are, nor even
look too closely into the nature of his own mind.
The institutionalising of the mind does not have
the effect of uplifting but of deadening it; the limited
liability of the committee member, of the company
promoter, of the member of any public body, does
not make the liability a higher one though it limits
and changes its aim; in short there is no evidence
for the assumption that the general mind is higher
in its manifestations than the particular mind.
Rousseau saw rightly when he realised that
particular, institutional, general, and addition wills
are all different, and in realising this difference he
contributed a new outlook for social research; but
when he claimed that institutional and general
wills are able to correct the social ills that men
and women are heir to, he wrote wildly and with-
out any data. But someone may ask is it necessary
that the social effort should be better than the
o6 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

individual effort, if this really be social effort and
therefore different from particular effort will it not
explain social activity? Rousseau did not ask
this. None the less it is as an exploring mind,
with its vision of an unexplored panorama, that
he will be remembered.
CHAPTER X

HEGEL’S ‘‘ REAL ’’ AND INCIDENTAL WILLS

For Chapters X and XI the following? diagram may be of
assistance to the reader :(—

RoOUsSEAU’s WILLS HEGEL'S WILLS
Personal golne denial
3a Incidental
Institutional < Real

Social { Addition
; Incidental
General ZT Real

Hegel's teaching seems to divide all wills, except the addition
will, into Incidental and Real.

DEFINITIONS OF WILLS,

Personal or particular. The individual will.
Social, comprising (a) Institutional or team traditions.

(6) General, expression of national conven.
tions.

(c) Addition, being only the expression of a
numerical majority.

The term “will” is of questionable psychology, some word
expressive of consensus activity would no doubt be better.

I HAVE ventured to use the word ‘‘ incidental ’

instead of the word ‘‘ actual ’’ as opposed to

Hegel’s other term of *‘ real,” as it seems to me

to express more clearly Hegel’s attitude. His con-
97 G
98 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

tribution raises a different view from that of Rous-
seau, though no doubt he was greatly helped by
him.

Hegel, like Rousseau, abandons the contention
that Politics is simply a vote-seeking and vote-
counting process; he, even more than Rousseau,
sees the incapacity of the ordinary man and woman
to cope self-consciously with the political task.
When, then, was Hegel's teaching? I am, of
course, not here concerned with the complicated
philosophy of Hegel, or even with his idea of
State sovereignty, any more than with Rousseau’s;
what for the moment is the issue is that Hegel,
like Rousseau, sees the necessity of an indirect
process which, as it were, sublimates, changes and
raises individual activities.

Hegel begins by assuming that there are in our
natures two kinds of will, or perhaps it would be
truer to say two manifestations of the same will;
the real will, deep, constant, abiding, and the
incidental or momentary will. There is the parti-
cular or personal will with these two manifestations,
and in addition there is the social will also with
these two manifestations, so that the teaching of
incidental and real wills is added to Rousseau’s
conceptions. There is no antagonism, only a
further development of the general position.

Mr H. A. L. Fisher has a statement in his Essex
Hall Lecture on ‘‘ Orthodoxy ’’ which explains
HEGEL'S WILLS 99

Hegel's outlook, though it was not written in rela-
tion to his teaching. ‘‘ To disengage the per-
manent, the fundamental . . . from the transitory
and variable embodiments . . . to note what
characteristics . . . are fashioned by historic
accident . . . and what characteristics on the
contrary are rooted in the deep subsoil of
humanity, is perhaps the greatest function which
the historian is called upon to perform.’ Here
are assumed, as almost axiomatic, three proposi-
tions: (1) That there is a surface state of the
mind, an incidentalism which has the appearance
of historic accident. (2) That there is a deeper
and nobler reality which directs this incidentalism
and which it is the business of the historical
student to interpret. (3) That there is an unknow-
able rock of reality below the subsoil not compre-
hensible to our minds. Hegel is concerned with
the first two.

No great thinker ever puts forward a view that
is fundamentally stupid, and this claim of Hegel's
rests on a very real foundation and has some strong
evidence in support of it. First, let us consider the
realities of these real and incidental tendencies
in the individual man and in society, admitting
that the word ‘‘ will *’ is open to criticism.

It is evident if one thinks of one’s friends or of
oneself, or reads a good comprehensive biography

! Orthodoxy, pp 12-13.
100 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

that these real and incidental manifestations are
easily observable. Perhaps there are few better
examples than that of Dr Samuel Johnson. Here
was a man capable of saying, and who frequently
did say, words with the sharpest of stings in them;
but for the most part, people understood that
behind this rough, moody and changeable exterior
was a kindly, inspiring, reliable personality. In
Johnson as in most, if not all, men and women, the
contrast between these two so-called wills is self-
evident and it is also, of course, evident that the
relatively constant real will rules over the
incidental. But the position even here is not so
simple as it looks. The real will is constant in
some lives, it is strangely different at different ages
in others, and if it is different rather than progres-
sive, what becomes of the uplifting power of the
real will?

But even the incidental will is not always inferior
to the real will. Dr Martineau has defined these
changes of our moods as ‘‘ tides of the spirit ’’ and
these ebb and flow in moments of small and great
‘“ aspiration ’’ and inspiration,’’ hence the
incidental is sometimes far above the real constant
character, it may even inspire it and lead to a
higher level of constancy. And though it may be
probably truly said that the healthy unfolding of

X

! In some minds it is not the contrast but the amplifica-
tion that one notices.
HEGEL'S WILLS" 7" “ge
the stages of human life from the cradle to rich
green old age, manifests a real will or tendency
which is ever reaching greater and greater mental
or spiritual heights, yet this healthy unfolding is
the exception rather than the rule, and what no one
knows is how far the tides of the incidental will,
in their ebb and flow, influence this final result.

Now, as Professor Hobhouse! urges, it is when
we attempt to bridge the chasm between the
Personal and the Social Incidental and Real wills,
that the difficulty begins.

It is fairly easy to see that there is some con-
census of social tradition or heritage, and that this,
as many writers, and lately Professor Graham
Wallas, have pointed out, is very large, but what
evidence is there that the real will of the individual
and the real will or constant tendency of the nation
correspond ?* If they do not correspond, there is
great injustice in majority rule, and, moreover, the
real and incidental wills of any society would
always seem to be below the real and incidental®
wills of the healthy individual, because the real
and incidental social wills could not rise above the
highest common denominator of the uniting forces
of the personal human mind, but must always

* The Metaphysical Theory of the State.

3¢ In fact it is most often in abnormal circumstances,
such as war, that a true common will emerges”

(Sociological Review, Vol. xiii., p. 131).
* Only the incidental in moments of inspiration.
#9

“102” SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD
tend to be lower, and this is what crowd experience
confirms. A political audience may have an
intense, it seldom has an exalted feeling, unless
the orator is, as it was said Gladstone was, able
to make his own feelings reverberate in those men
and women to whom he was speaking; but is it
the social general will which achieves this? Have
we not better examples of the social wills in such”
gatherings as an army, or a meeting of trades
unionists, or a formal meeting of some financial
company where common interests unite and direct
masses of men and women? Have we any reason
to believe these common calls are more exalted
than individual ones? I think it must be said that
the reverse is the case. In war, as in peace, great
acts of heroism and sacrifice are usually individual
personal acts, though they may or may not have
the social will behind them. In the acting
together of a body of men, let us say in order to
succeed in a forlorn hope, it is likely that the
madness of a courageous despair will lead them to
deeds of extreme power, or if fear catches them,
of extreme panic; but it is doubtful if in these
moods, such a body of individuals ever acts with
that sublimer mercy or sacrifice that one solitary
soldier will deliberately tender to a wounded com-
rade or even to a fallen enemy.

Lowell says, and history confirms his assertion,
that the brave man chooses the side of Truth or
HEGEL'S WILLS 103

any other good ideal at a time when the multitude
of comrades or associates stand aside or even
oppose, and that this brave man or a small group
of brave men, stand on the unpopular side, till the
“ multitude make virtue of the faith they had
denied.” If this is human history, what becomes
of the plea that the social real wills exalt the
personal real one?

Facts are, however, the court of appeal, and even
if they are seemingly contradictory, we must
recognise them.

Lowell, to quote once more from his poem The
Present Crisis, says, ‘‘ Truth for ever on the
scaffold, wrong for ever on the throne, yet the
scaffold sways the future.” Is this an example of
the social general real will leading upwards and
influencing both the personal incidental and real
wills and the general incidental will? To take
again Hadow’s quotation from Mendelssohn and
give it in full as Hadow gives it.

Mendelssohn writes :

““ That which is called ‘ the public’ is exactly
the same here as elsewhere and everywhere : the
simple public assembled together for an instant, so
fluctuating, so full of curiosity, so devoid of taste,
so dependent on the judgment of the musician—
the so-called connoisseur.”

Disregarding the assertion that the public is the
same in France as in England or America, or
104 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

similar to the public in a Kaffir kraal; disregard-
ing this assertion, have we in this fluctuating,
unreliable public an example of the general
incidental will? And when Mendelssohn con-
tinues, ‘‘ But against this we must set the great
public, assembling year after year, wiser and more
just than connoisseur and musician, and judging
so truly and feeling so delicately,’”’ have we an
example of Hegel's general real will rising above
both personal wills (real and incidental), more
certain, more constant, more dominating and up-
lifting in its power ?

Mendelssohn wrote this in 1846, Hegel died in
1831. It is unlikely that Mendelssohn read Hegel
or that if he did, he was thinking of him when he
wrote those words to Jenny Lind, and yet they
state in two contrasted sentences all that Hegel
seemed to have intended. Bring, Hegel would
claim, our little personal incidental and real wills,
and the social incidental wills of a nation or
humanity nearer to the social real wills that voice
Time’s testimony, and you will, you must, make
discords cease and win over a nation or humanity
to the goal of progress.

Lord Haldane in an extremely informing little
book on Higher Nationality seems to assume
that Hegel meant by his social real wills, kinds
of crystallised social conventions and traditions,
he speaks of ‘‘ The system of ethical habit in
HEGEL'S WILLS 105

a community. . . . There may be a low level

. and we have the spectacle of nations which
have even degenerated in this respect. It may
possibly conflict with law and morality, as in the
case of the duel. But when its level is high in a
nation, we admire the system, for we see it not
only guiding a people and binding them together
for national effort, but affording the most real
freedom of thought and action for those who in
daily life habitually act in harmony with the
general will.”

Haldane gives the example of Socrates when
he is unjustly and unsocially condemned by the
Athenian state and could escape and would not,
as obeying the social real will in sacrificing him-
self for its ideals, but I think in Socrates’ mind
there would be three distinct elements.

1. There would be the better social conventions
of Athens, which would suggest to Socrates
that he must act as an Athenian free man
and as an Athenian philosopher, and not
‘“ play truant,” when the hour of peril
comes. It is a convention, as Ruskin says,
for soldiers and doctors, and policemen and
firemen, not to desert their respective posts
in times of peril.

These are conventions, or Rousseau’s social

wills, which may be compelling and either high

* Higher Nationality, pp. 25-26.
106 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

or low. But it would not be Mendelssohn’s
greater public that qualitatively selects the geniuses
age by age, and, where it is strong, uplifts a
nation. When Haldane continues and quotes the
words Socrates says, he seems to feel, I think, that
the second element in Socrates’ decision is begin-
ning to influence him. This second element is
not any one of Hegel's social real wills, but
Socrates’ personal real will that addresses him.

2. ‘“ Listen, Socrates, to us who have brought
you up.”’ I don’t think Socrates meant any
conventions by this expression, but the
invisible call of greatness that came from
the visible signs of the great minds of the
past. These minds, like Dante’s noble
shades, seemed to fuse into one great appeal,
““ Do not fail us,” and Socrates continues,
““ This is the voice which I seem to hear
murmuring in my ears . . . and prevents
me from hearing any other.”

3. Lastly, in Socrates’ trial, he uses the reverse
simile; ¢ the voice ’’ is silent as it only is
when it need not warn him; there is the
peace and rest of a still and quiet conscience
in his own soul, and so with the better social
conventions (Rousseau’s social general will),
with the call of the personal real will and
with the silent small voice all in agreement,
he takes his course and abides his fate.
HEGEL’S WILLS 107

Now, the first of these elements is undoubtedly
social in this, that the conventions are the tested
and proved workings of a social body of men and
women.

The second element is the social- and world-past
of the great minds speaking immaterially to those
present minds that are great enough to listen to
them ; this is the personal real will at its highest,
and is truly aristocratic in that it is the great of
the past speaking to the best and the better of
to-day; by the multitude it would be scarcely
heard.

The third element is ‘‘ the voice > which prob-
ably all hear in moments of moral indecision and
which, if one refuses to listen to it, becomes more
and more inaudible. It is an individual intuition
almost exclusively.

It seems that this thought of Hegel’s has opened
up great issues in regard to ideals of social
progress.

1. It looks as if there is a personal real will
in every human character to which the fleeting
incidental will, mostly a wayward one, should con-
form, but occasionally its exalted activity should
be dominating.

2. That there are conventional social traditions
or wills, the good taste of a society, the custom
of an institution, which are the sublimated and
‘relatively constant guides or wills of individual
108 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

citizens in civic matters. These may or may not
tend to rise with democratic institutions and they
are kinds of social ‘‘ jumping off ”’ platforms for
each member of the community. It is this
principle that Dr F. H. Hayward would seek to
make as conscious and as effective as possible by
school celebrations, etc.

3. There is the law of righteousness written in
a man’s or woman’s soul.

And great and magnificent sources of social
power as these are, I think it must be said at
present that Hegel’s theory of Social Real Wills is
not yet fully substantiated; that so far as it is, it
does not yet afford any support to the view that a
widening system of representation tends to uplift
a nation, though it does raise questions of the
utmost importance for all societies.

OTHER CrOwWD, PoPULAR AND HERD VIEWS OF
SOCIETY

I have not space to touch on such views as
those of Professor Robert Michels who assumes
an inevitable oligarchical tendency in democracy.
But in the main it may be stated that there is no

* Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth
Century, Vol. vi., Chapter XVIII, says, ‘All nations are
in truth governed by aristocracies ’’; he means autocracies
and Bryce seems to hold a similar opinion.
HEGEL'S WILLS 109

existing theory that can, so far as it seeks to
explain democracy, be called scientific.

It does not, of course, follow that because no
democratic theory of society is forthcoming there-
fore no social theory of the people’s influence and
value in public life is obtainable. It has become
almost an axiom, especially since Herbert Spencer
sought to show how public social conditions are
related to the individual effort of genius and even
partly explain it, to make the people the centre
of most social inquiries and even to claim that
genius is only the expression of the mass life.
But ‘‘ Popular’’ and ‘‘ Great Man ’’ views of
society may both be held without upholding
either democratic or aristocratic views.
CHAPTER XI
GLADSTONE’S POLITICAL SUPRA-HUMANISM

HUXLEY, in his fascinating book, Evolution and
Ethics, which is important but at times irritating
in its contradictory presentations, suggests in one
and the same breath, as we have already seen in
Chapter VIII, that man can never govern his own
destiny and yet must do so, because while he can
breed and environ domestic animals and plants
(as he knows what he wishes these to be) he can
never do the same for himself as he cannot be the
creature to be bred and reared, and the breeder
and nurturer at the same time. Man cannot con-
trol his own destiny because he needs a master-
gardener to tell him what this destiny ought to be.
Yet he appeals to man to foster his own ethical
efforts against nature’s unethical teaching.

Tennyson also speaks of the ‘‘grand old
gardener '’ who smiles at the claims of long
descent.

If Christ had extended his great views to
society, he also probably would have used the

same image but added to it the concept of pro-
110
GLADSTONE’S SUPRA-HUMANISM 111

vidence; that God, in His Providence to us, and
in a deeper sense to all life, is the Master-gardener.
And this assumes, and Huxley ought logically to
have assumed it too, that in human political
affairs, the utmost scholarship fails and that man
must rely for a political principle on some supra-
human method which will get over the difficulty of
man’s inability to predict what even the next ten
years may bring forth.

Christ would have said, ‘‘ Observe the begin-
nings, observe the new seeds of social effort in
order to surmise what the full plant will grow
into,”’ and Professor Patrick Geddes has often
used, I think wisely, a corresponding simile, in
suggesting that the budding effort of the new social
tendencies should be noted so as to be able to inter-
pret what the later unfolding will be.

The conclusion of Gladstone’s Impregnable
Rock of Holy Scriptures is peculiarly interesting
to the social student, as there he gives more clearly
than elsewhere his views about the way he looked
at and socially studied his fellow-men. It is here
made evident that many of Gladstone’s seeming
inconsistencies, which Lecky, from his point of
view of ascertainable truth and scholarship regarded
as Jesuitical, were explainable in another way.!

'I am not dealing, it must be remembered, with
Gladstone’s character, but with his avowed and probably

sincere political perspective. (See also the reference to
Austin at the end of Chapter VII.)
112 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

Gladstone, a student of men and women, is in this
curiously like Stubbs, a student of books and
human history ; they both seemed to feel the need
for a higher guiding principle even than that which
could be derived from the most scholarly and pains-
taking of personal opinions.

Gladstone's view would appear to be that (1) the
opinions of men and women are in an incessant
state of ‘‘ argumentative contention,’ that even
wise and capable men are apt to be misled by
the contentiousness of their own minds and th.!
reactions of opinion are so various as to be
rationally unpredictable. (2) During the time of
contentiousness it is almost impossible to say in
what direction the final conclusions will turn, but
there comes a stage when thought crystallises itself,
and immediately this process begins to occur is
the time when a question is politically ripe for
‘“ agitation *’ and subsequent legislation.

For this reason he does not claim for himself,
what most authorities would, an unusually sound
experience on the issue to be considered, and an
extensive scholarship; he says ‘‘ They form the
testimony of an old man, in the closing period of
his life. It is rendered with no special qualification
but this one. Few persons of our British race have
lived through a longer period of incessant argu-
mentative contention, or have had a more diversified
experience in trying to ascertain, for purposes
GLADSTONE’S SUPRA-HUMANISM 113

immediately practical, the difference between
tenable and untenable positions. Such experience
is directly conversant with the nature of man and
his varied relations. . . .’}

Gladstone thought this experience of great value
because he doubted apparently the capacity of any
powers in his own mind, or in any other person’s,
to form, by means of scholarship, a political opinion
which would tell him what are the advancing and
what the receding waves of thought; and how and
in what way these advancing waves would amplify
or moderate each other. Gladstone’s belief in
this respect might be called a kind of Political
Pragmatism except that he strongly held that
it is a Providence that finally directs man’s
activities.

When, therefore, Lecky says of him, that the
whole great field of modern scientific discovery
seemed out of his range,” his reply would have
been he did not need it; and to the criticism that no
‘“ other great politician so habitually steeped his
~ politics in emotion,” ¢‘ that the power of ingenious,
subtle, refined controversy attained in Gladstone an
almost preternatural perfection,’’ that ‘‘ he excelled
in noble, dignified declamation appealing to the
loftiest motives,” Gladstone would have replied
again that these aspects were necessary to influence
rightly living minds; and when Lecky adds ‘‘ No

‘c

The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, pp. 253-4.
H
114 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

English politician indeed so frequently introduced
into the perorations of his political and even party
speeches God, duty, honour, justice, moral obliga-
tion, divine guidance . . .”’ the answer would have
been ‘‘ It is providential laws which decide the
issues of controversy.” And Lecky’s assertion that
‘“ Gladstone was incomparably superior to Burke
in the power of moving great masses of men,
dominating in parliamentary debate, catching the
tone and feeling of every audience, and carrying
an immediate issue ’’; that he had ‘‘ susceptibility
to every passing impression, the constant regard to
immediate issues and immediate popularity ’’; that
he could when he chose, use strangely ambiguous
‘“ misty sentences’’; Gladstone would once more
have answered, ‘‘ I watch and guide the moods of
men ’’; and to the charge that no ‘‘ prominent
English statesman has so fundamentally changed
his convictions’ and ‘‘ has combined so remark-
ably extreme confidence in his own infallibility with
the utmost instability of judgment,” Gladstone
would, no doubt, have said, ‘‘ men’s opinions guide
me.” Hence there is no inconsistency in the fact
that he was ‘‘ the first English minister . . . to
bring his policy, in great meetings, directly upon
the people,” and ‘‘ delighted in placing himself in
touch with the masses of his fellow-countrymen ”’ ;!
these and other powerful and illuminating criticisms

* Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, Introduction, 1913
GLADSTONE’S SUPRA-HUMANISM 115

of Lecky’s can be explained by one principle which
Gladstone has given us in his own words; he
believed in the study of ‘‘ tenable and untenable *’
positions, and that the tendencies of men could be
read directly from themselves, just as a gardener
studies how to treat his flowers by directly ob-
serving them, rather than from books.

He had apparently no belief whatever in the
immediate or final educability of the masses of
men and women, ‘‘the masses of mankind, to
whom historical and scientific arguments, whether
negative or affirmative, are, and probably must
remain, inaccessible,”’* but he watched ideas
coming and going in these masses, saw what
thoughts had vitality and what seemed to be dying
and, like William James, he saw that when these
vital thoughts in the people have reached a certain
fruition, then is the time for action. He believed
in scholarship apparently for a study of past events
and as an improver of scientific knowledge and
invention ; but as for politics and practical action,
he conceived the destiny of mankind to be hidden
from the wisest as well as the most ignorant ; there-
fore one must act ‘‘ upon the signs of the times ’
as manifested by the thoughts and feelings of men,
as read in their faces and conversation. Gladstone
watched the people as a football or cricket expert
might do his game, for developments, and gave

' Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, Conclusion.
116 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

to the most living and successful ideas political
clothing.

Stubbs, in spite of his life of scholarship, held
very similar views. He felt with Gladstone that
knowledge makes one modest; ‘‘ there are few
questions on which as much may not be said on one
side as on the other,” ‘‘ the great necessity of
practical judgment is patience and tolerance,”
““ for men are born most certainly with constitu-
tional inclinations,’”’! which it is difficult to over-
ride, and on current issues these inclinations can
hardly be over-ridden. Stubbs also held that
history taught its best lessons when it dealt with a
past sufficiently far away to have few living issues.
In Gladstone’s mind, the people are to be con-
sulted because only through intimate contact with
them can the feasible be discovered, and the long
vision of truth, with its scholarship, is not helpful
to the shorter principles of political urgency.
Truth and Feasibility are therefore to him dignified
twin studies, the first telling us how the path of
history reveals itself, the second, hardly less
important, teaching us to read from practical
association with the lives of the people what can
be done now.

Let me expand and illustrate this position a little.
Comte, Lewes and Spencer towards the end of their

! Stubbs, Lectures on The Study of Medieval and
Modern History.
GLADSTONE’S SUPRA-HUMANISM 117

lives, all considered that they had not sufficiently
emphasised the play of feelings in men’s and
women’s lives, and Ratzenhofer has amplified this
claim. Hegel apparently believed that this play
of feelings incapacitated their incidental wills, but
that the real wills kept in spite, or perhaps because
of these feelings a fairly true course. But for the
most part all of these thinkers believed that the
ordinary man and woman in any occupation, who
constitute the masses of all lands, seldom think and
when they do, use their powers sophistically. Max
Miiller states this view of mankind very clearly.
‘“ Arguing when reason meets reason is most
delightful, whether we win or lose; but arguing
against unreason, against anything that is by
nature thick, dense, impenetrable, irrational, has
always seemed to me the most disheartening occu-
pation. Majorities, mere numerical majorities, by
which the world is governed now, strike me as mere
brute force, though to argue against them is no
doubt as foolish as arguing against a railway train
that is going to crush you. Gladstone could
harangue multitudes; so could Disraeli; all honour
to them for it.”’!

Gladstone would have accepted this attitude, but
have added ‘‘ haranguing has its principles and its
utilities, for it deals with the feasibilities of human
life,” and when Max Miiller continuing writes as a

* My Autobiography, pp. 209-300.
118 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

student, he would have nodded acquiescence. ‘If
we know some truth, what does it matter whether
a few millions, more or less, see the truth as we see
it? Truth is truth, whether it is accepted now or
in millions of years. Truth is in no hurry, at least
it always seemed to me so. When face to face with
a man, or a body of men, who would not be con-
vinced, I never felt inclined to run my head against
a stone wall! ’’?

Gladstone would have accepted this cleavage
between the student and the ordinary citizen and
asks us to consider it. ‘‘ The whole system of our
moral conduct, and much also of our conduct that
is not directly moral, rests upon belief as contra-
distinguished from knowledge.”’> This attitude
must be reckoned with. ‘‘ I do not say that we are
creatures of what surrounds us, for we have power
to reflect and control it. Yet, reflection and control
are exercised but little, in comparison with the need
for them; and in the absence of such exercise, it is
the surrounding atmosphere, it is the ordinary
standard, accepted, and to a great extent necessarily
accepted, without examination, that both supplies
the stock wherewith we individually begin the great
adventure of the world, and that guides our life,
except in the rare cases where depravity on one

! My Autobiography, p. 301.
2 Barnett Smith, Thoughts of William Ewart Glad-
stone, pp. 47 and 81,
GLADSTONE’S SUPRA-HUMANISM 119

side, or . . . heroism on the other, causes us to
adopt a separate standard for ourselves.” ‘‘ The
truth is we are all traditioners in a degree much
greater than we think.”’

William James paraphrasing the Bible’s teaching
has a chapter in his Talks to Teachers ‘“ On a
certain Blindness in Human Beings ’’ and in his
Will to Believe raises more comprehensively the
same question and says ‘‘ Our passional nature not
only lawfully may, but must, decide an option
between propositions whenever it is a genuine
option that cannot by its nature be decided on intel-
lectual grounds.” Gladstone holds a more
extended and general attitude than this, that the
emotional and passional influences pervert truth to
such an extent that the majority of men and women
never see it and, unlike Stubbs, he assumes that
this bias is beyond the power of the educationist to
get rid of, and that in most cases the teacher is
biassed too.

But Gladstone also appeared to believe that even
if man were dominantly intellectual (and he is not)
he yet would fail, as social circumstances them-
selves are beyond the control of human thought.
In Mr Frank Norris’s Octopus a Railroad
Magnate is made to say ‘‘ Railroads build them-
selves,” ‘‘ The wheat grows itself,”’ *“ The wheat
is one force, the railroad another, and there is a

'W. E. Gladstone, ‘‘ On Ecce Homo,’ p. 42, 1368.
120 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

law that governs them,” ‘‘ Men have only little to
do in the whole business.”

This was Gladstone’s other teaching. The issues
of men’s and women’s lives are not only weighted
with human feeling, they are weighted with world
circumstance and gigantic laws. Men play in such
positions only a minor part. And he believed that
it is a politician’s first business, and almost his last,
to investigate the contentiousness of human beings,
and discover its laws, and the conditions of inter-
actions of circumstances and discover their laws,
and from the two form a political judgment of
expediency. Gladstone disliked an issue being
forced before its time, he disliked corruption in
public life which prevents natural fruition of an idea
or tendencies. Max Miiller has a passage which
summarises this view, ‘ what happens . . . when
fruit is pulled off a tree before it is ripe. It is
expected to ripen by itself, but it never becomes
sweet, and often it rots. A premature measure may
be carried through the House by a minister with
a powerful majority, but it does not acquire vitality
and maturity by being carried; it often remains
on the statute-book a dead letter! ’’! Gladstone
believed that there was a tree of social life, it is not
simply or chiefly a rationalistic tree; when the
legislative fruit begins to ripen there are signs that
it is ripening and these are more than logical signs;

My Autobiography, p. 303.
GLADSTONE’S SUPRA-HUMANISM 121

thought, feeling and circumstance must all co-
operate, and nature’s social laws will tell us what
is vital and what is maturing, as well as what is
unripe, over-ripe and rotten. Men have far less to
do in this than they egotistically believe, Pro-
vidence and Nature have far more.

A new perspective, a new panorama, a more
scientific if less clearly focussed vision is opened up
with the teaching of men of the calibre of Rousseau
at his best, Hegel and Gladstone. The self-con-
scious intelligences of men and women do not
explain the major factors of the political situation.
This, whether we know it or not, is a great
discovery. It does not lead either to despair or
carelessness but to the anatomy, physiology and
psychology of society, as like discoveries in biology
have led to the anatomy, physiology and
psychology of the single organism. It is therefore
Dawn not Darkness which is ahead of us, if we
choose to realise it.
CHAPTER Xl

RESEMBLANCES AND DIFFERENCES OF OUTLOOK AND
THE DEMAND FOR SCIENTIFIC STUDY TO SUPPORT
THE NEW THEORIES

THE great blunder that Rousseau and Hegel made
was the assumption, though for different reasons,
that the social ideal is higher than the individual
one. Perhaps this was because both men confused
importance with excellence. The importance of
the State must always be far greater than that of
its greatest or noblest citizen, but there is no
ground for believing, as Rousseau erroneously
asserted, that common opinion is ever more ex-
cellent than corresponding states of individual
opinion, when for purposes of comparison each
is drawn from a similar social strata of culture.
The institutional will and the general will have
lower, probably less extensive, ranges than the
personal will, but the chief point to recognise
is that they are different and ask for a different
psychology to interpret them, a social, not a per-

sonal, psychology. This discovery of the necessity
122
RESEMBLANCES AND DIFFERENCES 123

of a social psychology was probably Rousseau’s
greatest achievement, though perhaps he did not
understand what psychology scientifically meant.

Hegel’s position is not an alternative to
Rousseau’s, it supplements and extends it. But
he also hoped that in the discovery of the incidental
and real wills he had found a series of ascending
values of (1) personal incidental, (2) personal
real, (3) general incidental and (4) general real,
wills. It is surprising that a mind of the great-
ness of Hegel could miss such an obvious line of
destructive evidence as is afforded by genius
itself. It is not merely that the inspirational
moments of even ordinary men and women are
above the level, incidental and real, of social wills,
but in genius, the level of both wills is so much
above that there seems no near prospect of society
reaching even its lowest ranges, nevertheless his
recognition of the distinction between incidental
and real personal and social activities is an impor-
tant addition to Rousseau’s discovery.

Rousseau and Hegel both saw that society works
along vaster lines than the individual mind can
account for, and this attitude put an end to
the personal ‘‘ contract’ view of society which
Rousseau illogically also supported; both, how-
ever, were content with an expanded human
vision. Gladstone still further enlarged the
horizon by the conception of supra-human forces
124 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

or natural laws which operated beyond and within
the range of man’s personal and collective con-
scious and subconscious activities. Rousseau was
the unwitting Godfather of Crowd and Social
Psychology; Hegel shares with Herbart a like
position for the subconscious and ‘‘ behaviour ”’
schools of psychological thought, and Gladstone
brought social practice within the objective, imper-
sonal reign of scientific law.

To summarise :

(1) The attempt to think out what aristocracy
and democracy mean has led us to the conception
that it is family feelings and the development of
them which explain ancient and modern states;
that geneocracies, not aristocracies and demo-
cracies, are the social systems that have been
tried, and these have arisen by feelings rather
than by abstract thought.

(2) The ‘social contract’ rationalists from
Milton and Locke, even to Mazzini, raised vain
hopes because they saw men and women as
reasonable when they are actually desire-driven
and use thought only as an expedient.

(3) This brought on a reaction against the
rationalistic sentimentalism which had represented
the people as acting for freedom and as kept down
by tyrannous rulers, and the study of realities
discredited the belief that the voice of the people
is the voice of God.
RESEMBLANCES AND DIFFERENCES 125

(4) It would appear that no logical democratic
theory has ever been formulated, or is likely to
be formulable; but Rousseau’s, Hegel’s and Glad-
stone’s principles lead us away from Tationalism,
towards, perhaps, an impulse-theory of popular
control.

(5) Hence as the power of the people has
grown, the need for a scientific herd or crowd
study of the people has grown with it, and the
impetus of this study has come from the practical
perplexities which the rule of the people has
brought about.

It is this crowd inquiry we must next consider,
as all our investigations lead us to realise its
importance.
 
PART 1IV

THE NEW CROWD STUDY. ITS FOUNDA.-
TION IN FEELING, NOT REASON
 
CHAPTER XIII
THE NEW CROWD STUDY. ITS TWO SCHOOLS

IT is with the French Revolution that the crowd
as a natural history problem of scientific signif-
icance begins. The controversy, to give only one
example, in which Richard Price and Thomas
Paine on one side and Burke on the other were
protagonists, had in it new features of questioning,
unlike the earlier references to crowds, such as one
finds in Greek, Roman, and later historians. A
questioning which suggests the first perception of
something unfamiliar, and it is in the nineteenth
century, not, as one might expect, in earlier
centuries when crowds were more unruly, that this
awakening to the distinctive behaviour of crowds
begins to be noted. Perhaps the industrial
development with the formation of large cities
(in which great factories, large schools, huge
churches, public halls, mass domestic housing and
increased traffic had to be catered for) affected the
mind of the student; be this as it may, it is in
129 I
130 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

last century that the scientific study of the crowd
is first mooted.

THE GROWTH OF THE IDEA

I speak subject to correction, but the first
thinker I am acquainted with who really deserves
to be called the father of crowd studies is John
Dunlop; his name is so little known, except in
temperance circles, that he is given no place in
the British Dictionary of National Biography, but
he published two works, the first on Drinking
Usage in the thirties of last century, and in 1840
the second The Universal Tendency to Association
in Mankind. In this latter volume he defines
the laws of this association.

““ The same modes and habits of life, a desire
for the same description of food, like methods of
constructing lairs and nests and rearing their
young, similar necessities for defence; all con-
tribute to produce an instinctive association among
many of the varieties of living creatures. . . .”’*

He then considers in man the effect of common
language, identity of name, neighbourhood, the
effect of a ‘ Common Head or Leader,” public
opinion, public press, and a moral ** Vis Inertize.”
Forms of government are considered and then such

! Principle of Association in Mankind, p. 5s.
NEW CROWD STUDY 131

effects as conventions, military and other modes
of association, and mobs. In fact there is very
little that is not given some definite space, in a
book of 227 pages. 1 know of no writer on this
subject earlier than this Scottish author.

The second name is the Englishman, Philip
Gilbert Hamerton, whose work on Human Inter-
course deals more particularly with the effects of
a few individuals on each other; this was con-
ceived as early as 1877 as an idea, though his work
was not published until 1885.

Sir Francis Galton’s celebrated section on
‘“ Gregarious and Slavish Instincts ’’ in his work
Inquiries into Human Faculty was given to the
world in 1883; in this the term ‘‘ herd ’’ is applied
to early human associations.

Whether there are corresponding names in
French or other literatures, I am unable to state,
but in 1900 the word ‘‘ behaviour ’’ and a school
to be known as the ‘‘ Behaviourists’’ grew
up in which Lloyd Morgan was an important
worker, and the term was soon applied to human
behaviour.

Between 1890 and 1900 Gustave Le Bon and
Tarde published their first works dealing with
specific crowd problems, and from this time
onward, what is often spoken of as ‘‘ Social
Psychology ’’ has its active adherents all over the
civilised world.
132 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

When a thought thus takes nearly a century and
a half to ripen and be focussed in the mind; when
despite its difficulty it replaces an idea like *‘ equal
rights,” easy to apply and requiring little know-
ledge to talk about it, one may be sure it presents
a new horizon and that its influence will not readily
pass away.

MASss AND SOLITUDE PSYCHOLOGIES

What is the essential principle of crowd psycho-
logy? It is that passional and emotional not
rational modes of association chiefly explain the
organisation of society.

We have two fundamental feelings with regard
to our attitude towards our fellows which seem
contradictory to each other, but are, as Emerson’
in his essay on Society and Solitude finely saw,
linked together in a see-saw relationship; we
feel both oppressed and impressed by numbers.
Emerson truly says:

““ Through sympathy we are capable of energy
and endurance. Concert fires people to a certain
fury of performance they can rarely reach alone,”

and goes on

““ But the people are to be taken in very small

! Kant’s teaching on this subject was probably the
source of this essay of Emerson’s.
NEW CROWD STUDY 133

doses. If solitude is proud, so is society vulgar.
In society, high advantages are set down to the
individual as disqualifications. We sink as easily
as we rise through sympathy. . . . Men cannot
afford to live together on their merits, and they
adjust themselves by their demerits—by their love
of gossip, or by sheer tolerance and animal good-
nature. They untune and dissipate the brave
aspirant.’

‘“ The remedy is to reinforce each of these
moods with the other. Conversation will not
corrupt us, if we come to the assembly in our
own garb and speech, and with the energy of
health, to select what is ours and reject what is
not. Society we must have; but let it be society,
and not exchanging views or eating from the same
dish. . . . Society exists by . . . affinity and not
otherwise . . . and so often nature delights to
put us between extremes and antagonism. . . .
Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal. . . .
The conditions are met, if we keep our independ-
ence, yet do not lose our sympathy. These
wonderful horses need to be driven by fine
hands. . . .” :

This whole essay I would put in the forefront
of our study. He gives the essentials of our

1A view curiously contrary in its claims to that of
Rousseau and Hegel.
133 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

crowd problem. We have two natural feelings
which are intended by nature to be checks to each
other, they must always be in relationship, can
never safely be separated and must be felt rather
than reasoned about. In contact with people we
sink as easily, far more easily than we rise; high
advantages are a disqualification in society, and
the aspirant is untuned by it. We need our own
garb and speech, and can associate without ‘‘ eating
from the same dish.” This danger of eating
from the same dish and drinking often from the
same cup, rationed portions of identical food and
liquid is a spiritual as well as material danger of

all crowd influences.

Emerson is challenging as he always is when
at his higher level. He says ‘‘ men cannot afford
to live together on their merits,”” he dismisses it
as an impossibility, assuming that the best always
has and always will create rivalries, and he would
have us balance this by a large measure of living
alone. Emerson, as always, here assumes that
individualism is neither selfishness nor egoism but
the craving to fulfil the natural individual life. Is
it true that not even as an ideal, let us think care-
fully of these words, not even as an ideal can men
and women ‘‘afford to live together on their
merits ’? There are great issues hanging on this
question.

We may begin by looking at the central principle

‘¢
NEW CROWD STUDY 135

of association, the crowd feeling. First, there is
the indisputable fact that complete sentient loneli-
ness is terrible to man and beast. The Bible
opens with the thought that the solitary Adam
needs a companion, it reaches its climax, though not
its conclusion, in the scene before the Crucifixion,
when Christ’s disciples fell asleep and Christ is
left, alone wrestling with his fate, and Robertson’
probably truly says that his greatest agony was
that no one really understood the vastness of
his thoughts and feelings, and that his spiritual
loneliness was his extreme trial. The solitude of
nature’s fastnesses at The Poles, the solitude of
the mountain tops, or of being alone in a little
boat on the ocean, or walking over a vast prairie
or moor at nightfall; these are always terrifying
experiences to men, even the bravest of them, and
to women more so and children most of all.
Shepherds go mad shut in on solitary heights.
And yet there is no solitude that is worse than
the indifference of a great city thronged with
people, or that of being actively isolated from
public opinion. One of my students stated this
very clearly in the following words: ‘‘ It would
seem that one of the most outstanding fears of
the average man and woman is the fear of ridicule.
They feel that to voice an independent thought
would be to court isolation and, to them, to be

'F. W. Robertson, Zhe Loneliness of Christ. Sermon.
136 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

isolated is to be in a ridiculous position.” On the
other hand, on polar expeditions men see so much
of each other, that they seek solitude apart from
their companions, and women much strained, often
hide themselves in lonely places they would at
other times have feared. Higher animals have
this fear of solitude, even the unsociable ones,
and when great catastrophes of nature arise,
unsociable and sociable ones are drawn together.
Animals also by isolation from their kind make
strange companions, as a pig and a horse in a field
at night, or even an old gander going to rest on
the back of a mettlesome mare. There is abund-
ant and conclusive evidence as to the power and
widespread nature of this fear of being alone, and
also the dangers of a recluse’s life under any and
all circumstances. This is the basis of the negative
side of Crowd and Social Psychology.

Sir Hubert Parry? puts quite simply and nakedly
the opposite feeling, the positive stimulus of the
crowd.

““ Very few people are capable of being really
exhilarated by an audience of half a dozen, how-
ever enlightened. Most people, even of fine dis-
position and fine abilities, infinitely prefer an
audience of a thousand dolts. There is such
exhilaration in being the focus of two thousand
eyes, and seeing the flash of a thousand faces. It

* College Addresses, p. 129, 1920.
NEW CROWD STUDY 137

thrills the speakers, the performers, the actors. To
the person who has any humanity about him it
gives extra vitality. . . >!

Here is the positive feeling; the thrill comes
with numbers, illogically it is true; the enlight-
ened half-dozen do not draw as the thousand dolts
do; but the other fact is, the thrill comes in pro-
portion to numbers both to speaker and listener
if it is an audience and not an unrelated accumula-
tion of people.

And because there is no logic in it, there are
times when to see many people gives one the
feeling of disgust, as it has been expressed, of
maggots tumbling over each other on a fat cheese.
Probably everyone has experienced these feelings.

Now let me return to Emerson’s challenge. He
says ‘‘ men cannot afford to live together on their
merits > and, of course, in this thought he includes
women too. It was the dream of Socrates that
they could; he was always exhorting people to
make the best of themselves (we all think we are
willing to do this, but we are really unwilling to
face the labour of it) and at the same time to help
others to make the best of their natures too.

! This view of Parry’s, though no doubt true of the large
majority of men and women, is not true of all characters.
It was said of John Austin, “He wanted no [public]

excitement and no audience.”” See also p. 203 of this
volume.
138 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

Two CaMPS OF SOCIAL STUDENTS

Now it will be found if one studies the literature
of ‘Social Psychology’ widely, and also the
aspirations of many different kinds of active social
workers, that there are two tendencies which
divide the students of the subject into two camps.

1. There is the claim for the unity of the social
mind because it is said to rest on the basic unities
of all human minds.

Professor Graham Wallas' quotes and sum-
marises Professor Dallas Sharp’s claim as to what
is the social basis of education, but he does so,
I think, wisely with only qualified approval.

““ The true end of American Education is the
knowledge and practice of democracy—whatever
other personal ends our education may serve. . . .
We must all go together to school, with a common
language, a common course of study, a common
purpose, faith and enthusiasm for democracy.”
He recognised the need of special courses and
even special schools for the mentally deficient;
but for him the species is divided into the
‘“ deficient ’ and the *‘ normal,” and all the
normal are apparently treated in his thinking as
identical with each other. For the normal he pro-
poses ‘‘ one common school only for rich and poor,
up to the end of high school (i.e., sixteen years of

! Graham Wallas, Our Social Heritage, p. ¢8, 1921.
NEW CROWD STUDY 139

age); by which time we are pretty well all we need
for the purposes of democracy.” In this common
school there shall be ‘‘ one common course, one
broad universal course, thus educating for
democracy first and after that for life and living.”

Here is a beginning, and a very rigid beginning
for the identity of civic values.

2. Now let us take the other view, the belief that
there is something in life that is higher than social
unity, namely social harmony or a unity in
diversity.

“The spirit of human brotherhood is not
promoted by artificially breaking down those lines
of natural separation in the intercourse of different
classes, which result inevitably from congeniality
of pursuits and interests, from correspondence in
social position, and from harmony in manners,
tastes and sentiments. The folly here is in
meddling with the spontaneous operations of
nature. Left to themselves the different elements
of society fall easily into their proper places and
assume their natural functions, and work peace-
fully together without any collision—each man
happy in habitual association with those whom
education and circumstances have fitted him most

readily to sympathise with, and enable him best
to understand.’’?

! John James Tayler, Christian Aspects of Faith and
Duty, p. 150, Second Edition, 185s.
140 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

This is a view which seeks to reconcile and
combine individual and social aims together; is it
an impossible goal? It has one weakness in its
presentation, it does not state how hard it is to
encourage natural capacities to break through the
bondages of natural affections. Family ties do not
easily give capacity the opportunity to select con-
genial callings, those beyond the family pale are
always or nearly always given less favoured treat-
ment and those within more favoured, and so
clans and castes rather than true classes are built
up. Is it impossible to overcome these age-long
geneocratic tendencies?

Which is the better : the unity, or the harmony
of the social mind? This is the central issue in
Social Psychology and it is not yet decided into
what schools of thought this problem will divide
us.

THE ELEMENTS OF THE STUDY

It is well to remember what some of us in our
enthusiasm are excusably ready to forget, that this
new objective view of society is very new, and
hence assume that it is more ready to guide politics
than it is.

It seems certain that we have two funda-
mental feelings, which are not intellectual ones nor
influenced by any aesthetic qualities; these feelings
NEW CROWD STUDY 141

blindly draw us together or as blindly separate.
There is a crowd or herd feeling and there is the
unsatisfied longing called loneliness when we are
isolated from our kind, and even from the general
manifestations of life. There is a joy in solitude,
and there is a nausea of people of all kinds when
this solitary desire is not given its opportunity of
realisation. Some kind of health rhythm probably
exists between these seemingly antagonistic but
really complementary emotions. These emotions
vary very widely in human beings, probably much
more widely than in other living creatures, some
men and women always wanting much more of
one experience than the other, the extremes pass-
ing from the unhealthy limits of recluse tendencies
on one hand, to equally unhealthy limits of extreme
communism on the other, and the majority of
individuals who like a good deal of both, bridge
over the intervening degreess These feelings
form, as Kant claimed, the basis of human
association, but they are only the basis, not the
superstructure, and even at this stage, the first
opening of our study, we are in a state of nearly
complete ignorance as to what are the conditions
which stimulate the solitary, and what the associa-
tive feeling and what is the alternating relation
between them.

If by instinct is meant those activities which
seem to be done without the need of play and
142 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

education to acquire skill in performance because
such activities being specifically hereditary are
involuntary and need no teaching, then man is not
an instinctively social animal, he has no specific
innate social capacities as insects have, though in
times of crisis more general but usually subcon-
scious powers are awakened and may then irresist-
ibly command his consciousness. Man is not,
therefore, an instinctively social creature. But he
has in very full degree, what John Dunlop has
described, common modal habits of life which
arise out of his physiological functionings and
what Professor F. H. Giddings very aptly termed
‘ the consciousness of kind ’’ and Professor Lloyd
Morgan, organic behaviour qualities.

As Dunlop, applying the great teaching of
Daubenton and Cuvier to man, pointed out,
because we are human beings, we have human
habits of living; we eat, drink, protect ourselves,
rear our young, associate together in this human
manner. We inherit certain bodily and mental
characteristics which bring us together in both
rivalry and association, along discerning lines of
antipathy and sympathy, because of a certain
common organic behaviour. Our facial expres-
sions and gestures being human we can interpret
other human beings fairly correctly, as like feelings
and expressions go together and are shared by us
all. This is an intelligent interpretation but not
NEW CROWD STUDY 143

an intellectual one, because no logical process is
involved in it. By antipathetic or sympathetic
responses to the gestures and expressions of other
human beings, we feel what these other human
beings are feeling and respond in a hostile or
amicable way to them. We feel out our problem,
we do not think it out. This is our region of
biological inheritance.

But we are in quite an exceptional degree culture
—or nurture—profiting creatures, and language
has made it possible to make more complete use of
this nurture-profiting capacity and the discoveries
of writing and printing have vastly increased its
usage-storing power. Man has thus a social
inheritance only a little less important than his
biological, and even more distinctive of himself.
This inheritance is partly intellectual.

And as Tarde has shown, man is an imitative
creature governed by fashions, customs, public
opinion, common social atmospheres.

Again the grouping and isolating tendencies of
temperament lead not only to friendships and
enmities, loves and antagonisms, but also to the
breaking up of the social unity which the herd
feeling and imitative tendencies foster; thus the
solitary temperamental and individualising pro-
cesses develop side by side and interact with
gregarious ones. The situation grows more com-
plex as we contemplate it and we become more
144 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

and more conscious of our ignorance. There is
further a possession feeling which animals and
ourselves blindly feel, and which explains in man
such insanities as miserliness and other hoarding
obsessions.

So far, therefore, some social factors are shared
with other life-forms. Instinctive social impulses
are largely subconscious and of less relative
strength in our natures, but their very obscurity
and their power during times of stress, make them
all the more dangerous if we fail to recognise and
understand them. Herd and solitary feelings we
share with the large majority of sentient creatures.
Animals are imitative as we are, some remarkably
so, they have temperamental and individualising-
characteristics, and they have ‘‘ a consciousness
of kind ”’ and a social inheritance after their kinds
as ours are after our kind. The social instincts,
the herd and solitary feelings, temperamental
associations and aloofnesses scarcely take wus
beyond animal sociability. These elements in the
problem are not in the least distinclive of human
society, they explain a common foundation, not
the peculiar human architecture of the super-
structure raised upon it. Max Miiller as far back
as 1870 saw the danger of thinking that herd
impulses explain human society, but he went too
far in his condemnation. ‘‘To say that man is a
gregarious animal, and that, like swarms of bees,
NEW CROWD STUDY 145

or herds of wild elephants, men keep together
instinctively, and thus form themselves into a
people, is saying very little ”’ (Introduction to the
Science of Religion, p. 146). We know amazingly
little of these common basic qualities, and studies
which help us to, must be useful ones, but they are
not in themselves sufficient.

Our distinctive behaviour and our social inherit-
ance would perhaps explain the difference between
a Kaffir kraal and a beehive, but not why man’s
efforts have changed the face of the earth. The
most human aspects of society probably centre
round what to-day are popularly and even scienti-
fically disregarded, our intuitions, an inhibitory
will power and a desire, which we vaguely call
ambition, which is as blind as the hoarding desire.
It is doubtful if animals are intuitive; if they have
much or any will power; if they are ambitious.
If they do possess these qualities it is to an
extremely small degree, they are characteristics of
our natures. They explain man’s dominance over
all life.

The ability to think, even if it is little used,
appears to be a human characteristic, for by a pro-
cess of inhibitory exclusion, objects of like natures
are grouped together and common characteristics
with their concepts are defined. Only man
appears able to do this. And it may be as Kant
thought, that these abstract conceptions partly

K

Of mar i oy St Gof ~ pT VATE 5
146 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

rest on an intuitive basis. Perhaps aesthetic
design rests partly on the same will process, on
the power to exclude, as thought does, and on
intuitive ideals of beauty, such as the Hellenic
Greeks maintained. At any rate in this region
where moral obligation is felt and the need for
truth-seeking together with esthetic appreciation—
in this intuitive region of Pascal, Shaftesbury and
Kant—there seem to be powers, which, if difficult
to define, are almost or quite peculiar to man’s
nature and give him the power which animals
do not possess to look consciously before and
after. It is not denied, indeed it is part of the
object of this book to prove, that these higher
powers of thinking and idealising play but a small
part yet in human life, but small though this
influence is, it symbolises a greater that is to be,
and it has made man a tool-designing and manu-
facturing creature. These intuitional aptitudes
are for the most part only dimly perceived by the
ordinary man and woman as very distant influ-
ences in their lives, but in higher minds they loom
slowly up until they dominate the whole perspec-
tive of life. Alfred Russel Wallace thought that
this part of our minds is separated by a gulf from
the minds of other animals, and even if this be
not the case, and it probably is not, these back-
ground, guiding powers leading man forward will
humanise him more and more, and perhaps give
NEW CROWD STUDY 147

him other incentives for labour than mere appetite-
desires which are satisfied with physical living,
and help him to conquer his own most powerful
craving—ambition.

Ambition has been the most influential fore-
ground feeling, and it is of all blind unintellectual
impulses the strangest.

Mere desire—satisfaction or greediness—is
not a very dangerous tendency except to the
possessor. It is what animals manifest and it
is satisfied with satiety. = Gormands, drunkards,
libertines, even sensationalists are chiefly danger-
ous to themselves and—by the arousing of
like feelings in others, causing the spreading of
a social contagion of lower desire through large
areas of society—social development is thus
impeded; but all forms of healthy and even per-
verted desire-satisfaction are checked by more or
less definite reactions of repletion. It is not so
with ambition; it grows, as it has been said, by
what it feeds on. It is insatiable. It is this blind
aggrandisement of self far beyond all bodily or
mental needs which is the cruel and dominating
force and brings about ruthless animosities and
rivalries, vast world changes, and the most terrible
of human disasters. Even in its best forms it is
still insatiable from ‘‘ Log cabin to White
House ”’; the Cinderella of the kitchen desires
to be the first princess of the land; the private
148 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

soldier has the dreams of being field-marshal.
Most parents desire that their children should have
at least first, second, or third places in classes,
or be ‘‘ gold medallists ’’ or senior wranglers. It
is known that there are forty or more boys in a
class and only three top places, but each of those
eighty parents of those forty boys stimulates the
son to struggle for a supremacy which can come
only to three. It is known that medallists and
wranglers are rarer still, but the ambition is to
be first, to strive for the simple, blind object of
competitive supremacy with its show and display
of power. To be in all things ‘‘ top dog.” Yet
this lust of lusts, blind and unintelligent as it
is, causing its possessor violent twinges, pangs,
thwartings from rivalry and jealousy, and often
a ruined and overstrained mind and body; yield-
ing also little joy in success; has given man one
of his greatest sources of strength over other life
forms; it has graded society into ranks, it has
made specialisation of service, with all its tremend-
ous social advantages, possible. It is a human
quality as much in its perversion as when it
exhibits a knightly glory. It has caused man to
labour both voluntarily and under compulsion.
High rank, preferment, place, even laurels—the
stimulus behind these words through this absorb-
ing, sterilising, creating feeling—has been, and
still is, tremendous. This blind, unintelligent,

€¢
NEW CROWD STUDY 149

psychic power almost appallingly strong—men
and women will train themselves for its mirage,
its will-o’-the-wisp phantom which it holds out,
and will seek its bubble supremacy not only in
the cannon’s mouth but in every sphere where
mind and body may be staked, in order to listen
at last, if one succeeds against heavy odds, to a
song of envy, or more rarely of chivalrous praise,
which others less successful but of like minds sing.
I am not, it must be noticed, condemning ambi-
tion; it has, I suggest, given man a large part of
his greater heritage, but I assert that it is a blind
desire, entirely irrational, and yet it is, perhaps,
the greatest driving force of the ordinary man’s
or woman’s soul.

If, now, an attempt is made to summarise the
position, it would be as follows; human beings
have a vast subconscious instinctive, and, because
instinctive, uncontrolled, and because uncontrolled,
therefore irrational field of the mind, much smaller
relatively than in animals, but which in times of
crisis may completely dominate them, and in
ordinary phases of consciousness is probably more
active than they know; they have simple, crude,
blind feelings of association or herding, of solitude,
of possession, and these irrational feelings have
irrational relationships of impulse to each other.
There is an immense imitative field which explains
the irrational, unasthetic and sometimes unmoral
i150 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

character of fashions and customs, a field in which
logic plays no part at all. And in the higher area
of biological behaviour where bodily gestures and
facial expressions reflect hidden psychic activities
so that men and women interpret each other's
motives by sympathetic and antipathetic responses
and thus many problems of life are felt out, but
not thought out, there is still no place for reason.
And when at last we come to the motive which
has dominated social effort, the ambitious motive,
overwhelmingly powerful as it is, we find it not
only without rational justification, but that it
serves no end of bodily or mental functioning as
do all other desires. Finally in higher cultural
fields esthetic, moral and scientific activities
depend largely upon intuitions which, howeyer
arising, are not rationalistic. It is clear then that
when man is called a rational being, what ought
to be meant by this statement should be that he
is so comparatively, but not actually. In the
whole domain of man’s mind, reason plays a very
small, though, it is also necessary to insist a very
important part. Rousseau, Hegel and Glad-
stone, and to a large extent James, were not wrong
in thinking that rationalist theories are very much
too small to explain the whole field of man’s mind.
The failure to realise to an adequate extent the
non-rational factors of our consciousness has
caused much tragic error to be disseminated
NEW CROWD STUDY 151

in human affairs. It is not advisable that in
religious, educational-industrial and political fields,
this true proportion of the human mind should be
ignored. Recent measurements of human intelli-
gence have revealed a low level of intellectual
capacity in the ordinary citizen; a capacity, little
if any higher than the boy or girl of fourteen
years of age. This conclusion is supported by a
study of popular proverbs and by an impartial
study of daily and weekly newspapers, by popular
fiction, and the popular taste as shown in the
ordinary cinema, music hall and theatre. But the
question may be asked would it be so if more
attention were paid to our desires?’ In the
scientific answer to this question there may be the
hidden hope.

A political theory of government cannot, there-
fore, be scientifically founded on the intellectual
capacity of the citizen, it must take in the whole
range of the mind; no scientific theory of
educational development can rest on the claim that
our human natures are dominantly reasonable; no
scientific theory of trade or industry can be devised
which gives an ascendant position to the delibera-
tive action of the ordinary consumer in buying
goods or the ordinary salesman and producer in

! Sir Arthur Newsholme expresses the hope that our
educational system in the future ‘‘ will no longer be in the
main intellectual, but will train the emotions of vouth.”’
See p. 95, Vol. xliii., Journal of Royal Sanitary Institute
152 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

selling and manufacturing them. Desires, fashions
and traditional customs outweigh, and probably
far outweigh, any rational considerations; even
in religion itself, the histories of all religions reveal
not only large supra-rational noble intuitive
elements but still larger impulse-factors which
appeal to gregarious, ambitional, behaviouristic
and esthetic feelings, without which religious
ceremony is felt to be cold and dead, and reason
and science play a minor but not unimportant
part.

It seems then that the modern student is con-
fronted with what it is no exaggeration to claim
is an immense new field of research and our
ignorance of this field is so great that we have
not yet reached the exploratory stage of its investi-
gation. But this appears to be certain; if men
and women are not dominantly reasonable in their
activities, then natural social laws must play the
part which social students once assigned to human
intellectual guidance, and these laws must lead
human societies along some greater than human
path. What is this path? The Stoics and even
the Hebrews were content to realise that it existed,
the modern mind wishes to ask where it leads, and
in asking this question we leave the nursery stage
of our political existence behind and wander into
the untrodden regions where our social courses
must be set by the political stars of a political
NEW CROWD STUDY 153

firmament which is not man-made; and therefore
scientific compasses and charts are needed rather
than logical human dreams of how we should like
to make social utopias of our own.

It is impossible to predict what this new inquiry
will open up, but one immediate practical result
of great importance is already manifesting itself,
namely a re-study of the political horizon from
this objective crowd standpoint and the discard-
ing of the old logical ‘‘ wishing gate ’’ point of
view with its vain rationalistic promises.

ALTERNATIVES IN THE MODERN OUTLOOK

If one comes, from the acceptance of this new
horizon, to envisage society as being desire-driven
rather than thought-driven; if one sees that dis-
interested thoughtful, zesthetic and moral con-
siderations appeal strongly to the very few and
only very dimly to the many; if social progress is
reached not directly but indirectly through some
strange general laws which melodise or harmonise
what is so often a matter of personal conflict and
discord; if like Richard Baxter we come to see
human beings as busy, contentious, covetous ants,
only with Gladstone’s hopefulness that vast laws
prevent these contentious tendencies from going
astray ; if, once again, we accept with Gladstone,
154 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

certain laws, as vast as those governing human
character, governing also human circumstance, and
that somewhere there is to be discovered a larger
view, where mighty world forces and cosmic
forces mould human destinies; if this new horizon
is realised, and we are genuine social reformers,
we shall either seek universal, primal impulses in
our human natures to which great basic appeals
can be made, or we shall study how racial,
national, temperamental, idiosyncratic and other
differences, so often appearing antagonistic, are
really directed by one harmonising aim, then
we may find that what previously has been in con-
flict will, in the future, be resolved. One school
will seek to employ these universal, primal
impulses psychologically to communalise citizens,
the other socially to orientate them, and will
make use of all differences for a social harmony
which have hitherto so often been discordant.
These neo-communists and neo-individualists rest
their foundations on social psychology and the
laws of human life and not upon rationalistic
speculations.
CHAPTER XIV

THE NEO-COMMUNISTS—WHO STRESS BASIC
FEELINGS

THE *‘ neo-communists ’’ are not the old-fashioned
‘* levellers ”’ in a new guise, corresponding to John
Ball or John Lilburne or to the communists of
last century. This older view still lingers, it
needs answering, but it is the older and scienti-
fically obsolete outlook.

Mr Frank Hodges voiced this levelling appeal
as late as 1921.

‘“ The raison d’étre of the Miners’ Federation
has been to try to get the human mind to level
out as far as it is possible the natural geological
differences ’’ and he suggests that as it is good
luck that some coal owners own rich coal seams,
and some miners are lucky enough to work these,
so some colliery managers and engineers are lucky
enough to have inborn aptitudes for their work,
and he considers that in all these cases the more
fortunate should be prepared ‘‘ out of their good
fortune to make some sacrifice.’’*

* Daily Telegraph, 13th April, 1921.
155
156 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

There is much in this claim that every generous
mind will sympathise with, but it is too vague to
be helpful. There are several questions at issue:
(1) How far is success in work a matter of good
luck, and how far of character? (2) The more
gifted should make, no doubt, some real sacrifices
for the less gifted; it is a matter of degree, these
sacrifices should not be burdensome, and the less
gifted should be asked to live lives worthy of the
sacrifices made and thus respond in some adequate
measure themselves. It is wrong that the strong
should be exploited for the weak, and it is
anti-social. (3) It is assumed that the needs of
gifted and less gifted minds are nearly equal for
very unequal efficiency. This is not the fact.
(4) The greatest blunder is, however, the assump-
tion that labour can be successfully organised on
some rational or even ethical plan, that ambitions
and geneocratic feelings can be over-ridden, and
that natural aptitude which tends to work along
individual lines will work equally well when con-
trolled by collective systems. But were these
difficulties surmounted, the ideal of justice would
not be reached, another kind of injustice would
instead take the place of the older form; to average
out our powers and wants, even if it would not
make us all most hungry and enfeebled where
our aptitudes were strongest and often highest,
would at any rate take away the directing incen-
THE NEO-COMMUNISTS 157

tives of our minds, and a state of dullness would
be induced which would rob life of its best efforts.
The whole of this levelling policy is an attempt
to work against nature, to rationalise it, to assume
that a common agreement made between men and
women is all that is required. If the neo-com-
munists had restated these views they would have
made no real contribution but simply be resting
on the old assumption that men and women are in
their natures fundamentally, or at least dominantly
rational, and this we have already seen is a
delusion.

It has been assumed by some competent
biologists, notably Archdall Reid, that ‘‘ man is
distinguished from all other animals by his
enormous power of storing mental experiences,”’
of utilising these, and of profiting by the teaching
and experience of past generations. No doubt
individuals differ ‘* as much in their inborn mental
capacity as they do in bodily powers,”’ but it is,
he contends, a more or less general teachability of
all races of mankind which is the significant factor.
‘“ You can train a man of great innate capacity to
have the appearance of a fool. You can so train
a man of comparatively mean capacity that among
worse trained men he has every appearance of
ability.” Hence it is the system of education
which matters rather than natural powers.?

' The Biological Foundations of Sociology, Sociological
Papers, Vol. iii., and other works.

 
158 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

Now while one may admit that Sir Archdall
Reid’s statements are sound and, indeed, may
not wish to controvert them so far as they insist
on the enormous educative capacity of man as
compared with all living creatures, it yet appears
not less certain that he underrates other factors.
The stages of development in human life are real
stages if difficult to decipher, and these reveal a
close connection between educative capacity and
bodily states. Recent ‘‘ Mental Tests ’’ though
they are open to criticism yet reveal enormous
differences in range of functional mental capacity,
and the evidence thus obtained is confirmed by
medical records of prodigies, of distinctive talents
as well as of deficiencies, and these show that
though genius has a range of its own, yet the
instrumentality of ordinary minds is often strik-
ingly unlike even in those who are at work in
similar occupations. And it is within the experi-
ence of all social workers who are brought in
contact with men and women that individual
susceptibilities are touchy and difficult to manage
in the highest degree. And, lastly, the great
educationists like Locke, Pestalozzi, Seguin, etc.,
all claim that the individual factor cannot be wisely
overlooked. Reid, in fact, has revived the easy
political dream of Milton and Locke, but not
Locke’s truer educational one.’

1 Reid in this holds similar views to Professor Dallas
THE NEO-COMMUNISTS 159

The meo-communists do mot base their claims
either on a levelling or on an educative basis, but
rather on the appeal to great basic impulses which
they think largely explain the social aspects of
human life.

It would hardly be fair to quote any one writer
as voicing this new social claim. But Trotter and
McDougall as well as Ross (who largely follows
Tarde) seem to assume, though often for different
reasons, a human gregariousness which explains
the structure of human society and that lesser
kinds of group mind, included in larger groups,
explain the origins of human social institutions.

Professor McDougall puts his attitude shortly.
‘““ If this view, that human nature has everywhere
and at all times this common native foundation,
can be established, it will afford a much-needed
basis for speculation on the history of the develop-
ment of human societies and human institutions.
For so long as it is possible to assume, as has often
been done, that these innate tendencies of the
human mind have varied greatly from age to age
and from race to race, all such speculation is
founded on quicksand and we cannot hope to reach
views of a reasonable degree of certainty.’’!

In this passage it is the agreement, the unchang-
Sharp, quoted on p. 138. Locke referred to the emptiness
of the child’s mind, but he denied its general and equal

receptivity. :
1 Social Psychology. Section 1.

 
160 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

ing factors in the human race, its common basis
that is emphasised, and it is on these common
impulses that Professor McDougall would seem-
ingly build. Many critics may say, ‘‘ But how is
this? Is not the same teacher also a eugenist, does
he not want a selection of the better types, and if
he does, how can he also wish for ‘innate
tendencies of the human mind’ that do not vary
greatly ‘from age to age’ ‘and from race to
face?”

I am not sure that I understand this desire
for constancy on Professor McDougall’s part; it
does seem to conflict with any eugenic claim for
improvement of stock, but interest in the common
factors of society rather than the individual ones,
is not impossible to a eugenist, if it is the
‘““ common ’’ he wishes chiefly to select. Such
common selection Professor McDougall favours
(though he does not reject for his ‘‘ Eugenia ”’
state individual selection either); he says ‘‘ Any
population may in principle be regarded as con-
sisting of two halves; the half made up of all
individuals the sum of whose innate qualities or
potentialities is above the average or mean value ”’
. . . (if) *“ the birthrate of the superior half be
maintained at a higher rate than that of the
inferior half, then, even though the difference be
but slight, we may face the future with a well-
grounded hope,”’ and he quotes with approval a
THE NEO-COMMUNISTS 161

passage from a work of Messrs Popenoe and
Johnson, Applied Eugenics, which is as follows:
‘“ By getting that half of the race which is, on the
whole, superior in the traits that make for human
progress and happiness, to contribute a larger
proportion to the next generation than does the
half which is on the whole inferior in that
respect ’’ it is possible to raise the level of the
human race.! This is a communal rather than
an aristocratic effort to apply eugenic aims to
society. Dr C. W. Saleeby voices this commun-
istic effort still more drastically by quoting on the
title page of his Eugenic Prospect Browning's
words ;

¢ Make no more giants, God,
But elevate the race at once.”

Professor McDougall would not, I imagine, reject
giants if they can be born, but he stresses both in
his social psychology and in his eugenic teaching
a general elevation of the race, and is in these
respects a neo-communist. It is social solidarity
that he aims at encouraging.

Mr Fisher has recently expressed similar
principles from another angle.? ‘That the sane
and comfortable conduct of human relations

* McDougall, National Welfare and National Decay,
PP. 192-3.
2Hon. H. A. L Fisher, Orthodoxy, pp. 5 and 6.
L

 
162 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

demands some common ground of belief and
implies a general similarity in the constitution of
the human mind is a proposition which no serious
thinker would dispute. . . . Without some such
ground of common belief or orthodoxy the business
of life could not be conducted at all.”

Here Mr Fisher’s attitude corresponds to Pro-
fessor McDougall’s; society rests on ‘‘ a general
similarity in the constitution of the human
mind,” which explains a certain orthodox unity
in Politics and Religion and in other social sub-
jects; but Mr Fisher recognises also a social, and
more individualistic heterodoxy, would Professor
McDougall do the same? And if he would, would
he stress the orthodox side as being the one of
greater importance or allow that the heterodox
is an equal vital necessity? If he accepts such
common and divergent outlooks in citizens, is he
implying that these must both be relatively
unchanging from age to age, and from race to
race, or else all study will be founded on quick-
sand? There would appear to be an assumption
here that the communal far outweighs the
individual aim.

The stress therefore is placed on the agreement
of human characteristics. And Tansley follows
McDougall in making a like claim that three
primitive instincts, of the ego, herd and sex in
their individual interactions explain, if not all, at
THE NEO-COMMUNISTS 163

least most of human character, and it is these
interactions of ‘‘ universal complexes ’’ which
enable social and personal life to be understood.
It is unnecessary to quote more largely, and
the reader who is unfamiliar with ‘‘ Social
Psychology *’ and with ‘‘ Psycho-Analysis *’ need
not at the moment seek to realise what such terms
as instinct and complex mean; it is sufficient
to understand this, that a rationalistic theory of
society is abandoned and a new attempt is made
to show that ‘‘ the inherited instincts of man form
the basis on which the whole of his mental
activity is built up.””* This neo-communism
which stresses the basic impulses of men and
women, assumes a position upon which an
impulse theory of democracy might be built on
the foundations of the Rousseau, Hegel and
Gladstone position we have already referred to.
It is too early to criticise such efforts; as I have
said, even the exploratory paths are not yet opened
up. Mazzini, though in some aspects commun-
istic, wrote wise words, many times over, on this
communistic danger. ‘‘ These dreams . . . of the
abolition or fusion of the individuality in the
whole, have been through all time only transitory
incidents in the onward march of the human race;
reproducing themselves at each great intellectual
and moral crisis, and signalising the urgency of
* Tansley, The New Psychology.
164 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

a transformation; but in themselves nothing, and
very happily incapable of realisation.’ This,
perhaps, errs in not showing the meaning of the
fusion tendencies.

But meanwhile it will be readily conceded that
there is a great work for those who believe that
special gregarious impulses, whether fixed or con-
sistently varying, and special distinctively human
sources of behaviour draw men and women together
and make social beings of them. But if this
orthodox factor is necessary, as we must accept it
to be, is there another side often too much over-
looked, a progressive factor which through its
individualising power prevents the common forces
of our natures leading us into a stagnant state,
and thus does not allow the forces of reaction to
destroy us?

If so, the too great insistence on unifying
impulses may not allow the healthy play of
individuality and even confuse healthy individ-
ualism with unsocial, selfish particularism. It
may arouse a desire to minimise race differences,
though not a few experts on the subject tell us
that race cannot safely be so minimised, that on
the contrary it needs only to be understood; there
is the wish even for the mixing of racial blood,
though much of the teaching of the world is that

! Mazzini, Life and Writings, Vol. vi., pp. 195-6, Smith
Elder, 1891.
THE NEO-COMMUNISTS 165

the results are not satisfactory. There is the effort
to attain an anti-national cosmopolitanism, though
the experience of the modern world shows that
nationalism as in Poland and Ireland, to name
only two instances, is almost irrepressible. There
is the desire to obliterate not only caste but class,
when all the authoritative social students tell us
that division of labour is essential to a modern
state, and with these divisions, classes must, there-
fore, increase and not decrease. There is the
desire for equality of remuneration, when nature
tells us that we ought to be paid according to
our capacities and needs. There is the blurring
of sex ideals when nature and hygienists tell us
that sex differentiation is most significant in the
human being and that parenthood is a great ideal
which can only be realised by the recognition of
the different spheres of fatherhood and mother-
hood. In our educational system, there is the
curriculum method, when all our great educa-
tionists tell us, from Locke, Commenius, Rousseau,
Pestalozzi, down to Seguin and Groos to-day, that
the individual method of teaching should be the
guiding principle for social as well as individual
ideals, though it is not denied that common
practices are also necessary. The question is,
Can we assume, either that these individualising
tendencies are evil, or if not evil, that they can
look after themselves, and that mass methods and
166 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

communal life are what the State must seek to
enforce?

The objections to these assumptions are many,
but the most formidable are those already con-
sidered, which suggest the deteriorative influence
of all mass organisations; let us consider this
point a little more definitely in the next chapter.
CHAPTER XV
MASS RETROGRESSION—A DANGER

ProressorR McDouGaLL notes that most crowd
psychologists ‘‘ are concerned chiefly to point out
how participation in the group life degrades the
individual, how the group feels and thinks and
acts on a much lower plane than the average plane
of the individuals who compose it.”’! This is a
significant, ominous admission, and though our
author thinks he has a remedy for it, this is not
yet practically tested, whereas the degradation of
individual character is a self-evident reality, as
any close student of factory life or public recrea-
tion centres, etc., knows. This process of the
deterioration of character I have watched, when in
Medical Practice, in the deteriorative changes of
the individual mind under varying circumstances,
with my own eyes, as have other observers of
experience. Robertson Scott has recently referred
to them in his new volume on Japan and the
Japanese.?
'The Group Mind, p. 20, 1920.

2 The Foundations of Japan.
167
168 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

The explanation appears to be that intelligence
and feeling unless these are specially kept up, as
one sometimes sees in the tone of a good school,
a good factory, or a good church under some
capable leader, fall always to the highest and some-
times almost to the lowest common denominator
of the mental responses of the group. And this
common denominator is nearly always below the
natural spiritual levels of the average man and
woman of such a group, and it falls lower as the
group increases in numbers.

There is one possible gleam of light. Have we
paid too much attention to intellectual influences
and too little to emotional and passional tendencies ?
And will this neo-communistic study of the feelings
of gregariousness add new knowledge to combat
this great and growing evil which menaces modern
civilisation ?

Parry, speaking of such a high level institution
as the ‘“ Royal College of Music,” says, ‘‘ every
institution like ours (note the word every) has
constantly to be on the look out for and to circum-
vent > what he calls ‘‘ academism,’”’ which he
describes as ‘‘ knowledge of formulae without
understanding >’ and there is a ‘‘ factoryism *’ of
a very much more sinister character which drags
down and degrades factory life and which needs
open and careful study to-day, a study which it
has never yet received.
MASS RETROGRESSION 169

I will quote as an example, and only as an
example, for hundreds of references could be
given, the view, taken from the Life of Dr Arnold,
of school life, and though it may be said that the
abuses which were rife in Arnold’s day have been
largely swept away, it has to be remembered also
that the ordinary schoolmaster is not a Dr Arnold
and does not see with the eyes of one, and has
not the great uplifting power on his pupils.

Dr Martineau reviewing Stanley’s Life of
Arnold* points out how Arnold frequently
laments ‘‘ the irresistible strength of a low and
tyrannical school opinion; his vain attempts to
encourage any large number to struggle against
the stream; his sorrow ever renewed, at watch-
ing the declension from innocence to corruption,
and his pathetic forebodings on receiving, at the
opening of each half year, boys now in their home
simplicity, but entering on a trial, always severe
and rarely triumphant. He admits that, while
minds of a peculiar strength are elevated by the
ordeal, the ordinary class of amiable, well-disposed,
neutral characters are usually carried away by the
evil influence of the place, and gradually sink
from promise into corruption.” Anyone who
turns to Arnold’s own letters will find this a
balanced summary of their many references to this
subject. I will not consider other references such

' Essays, Reviews and Addresses, Vol. 1., pp. 6g and 7o.
170 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

as those of Charles Dickens and Professor Henry
Morley nor turn to recent ones on school life,
nor will I stop to analyse the claims of co-education,
which to me, at least, appear extremely weak. I
know of no trustworthy evidence to show that vice
is less in the co-education schools of the United
States of America or in Scotland than it is in the
mainly non-co-educational schools of England.
The tendency of the growing promiscuous sex
life of our century has not, I am convinced, been
uplifting but retrograde; its influence is patent in
factories and other institutions, in the Press,
Fiction and the Divorce Court. Co-education may
not be responsible for this, but it has had no
visible refining influence, it may even have the
reverse. This point, however, I am not concerned
with at the moment, except to dismiss it. It is the
crowd influence I wish to consider.

There is not a single one of Arnold’s statements
that the sincere honest clergyman could not repeat
from his own experience of grown men and women
now; he too knows ‘‘ the irresistible strength of
low and tyrannical >’ public opinion, he knows of
his own ‘‘ vain attempts to encourage any large
number to struggle against the stream,” ‘his
sorrow, ever renewed, of the declension woof
character, and he understands, as Arnold must
have done, those splendid and pathetic lines sung
in all our churches for centuries, ‘‘ lay not our
MASS RETROGRESSION 171

sins to our charge,” the secret call of the man
and woman who have found human circumstances
beyond their strength, and which goes on to
express their secret hope ‘‘ to decline from sin and
incline to virtue.” What makes this struggle of
the schoolboy and girl and the adult man and
woman so hard?

No one could accuse Kipling of being unsym-
pathetic to mass life, and yet he, like Burns, in
his advice to a young friend, speaks with no
hesitancy in If about what the boy will find when
he goes out into the world.

To keep your mental balance when all about
you lose theirs and blame their loss on you—

“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
And ‘ being lied about’ . . . ‘ don’t deal in lies’ . . .
Or ‘ being hated, don’t give way to hating.’ . . .

“If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves, to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stop and build ’em up with worn-out tools.””

“ If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue ” . . .
“If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘ Hold on.’ ”’
“ Yours is the Earth, and everything that’s in it.
And—which is more—yow’ll be a Man, my son!’

Why is the Earth the boy’s if he does this?
Because it is so exceptional to rise above and not
172 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

be dragged down into the ruck of circumstances,
or be even trampled down and destroyed.

There must be some universal influence which
does this, which produces the declension from
innocence to corruption, and it is found in the

principle that at low, not high points of character
"the common or vulgar, even the basic, contacts are
made.

Man is more exceptional than a Mammal.

A Mammal is more exceptional than a Vertebrate,
A Vertebrate than an Invertebrate,

A Multicellular than a Unicellular Organism.

~ What is common is, other things equal, always
lower, and the high is always rarer, though all rare
things are not always of the better type.
CHAPTER XVI
THE CHECKING OF MASS RETROGRESSION

Now there are various ways in which this mass
retrogression may be checked and probably the
best chance of an uplifting influence is in the use
of them all.

The Rev. Osborne Jay' made a proposal
many years ago, for what he unfortunately called
a ‘‘ Penal Settlement ’’ when he meant a supra-
penal one for the supra-feeble-minded. Stated
shortly, the position is this. It is admitted that
there are a few criminals who are of unsound mind
in this respect that they seem to be born without
some or all of the moral and social qualities, and
because of this inborn anti-social attitude need to
be kept in criminal lunatic asylums, even though
some of these unmoral men and women are quite
intelligent. It is found that others have been led
astray and that social circumstances are often
dominantly to blame. These should be reformed,
and what is needed is that the Reformatory, now
chiefly confined to the boy and girl in their teens,

* The Social Problem, 18393.
173
174 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

should be made a less forbidding institution and
include some adults. Those needing the reforma-
tory are often more courageous and intelligent than
the masses of men and women, but social life has
failed to satisfy them. There is, also, a normal
intelligent class who err because they are provoked,
for whom all that is wanted is some kind of
expiatory institution, again greatly differing from
our ordinary prison. Perhaps for all of these,
except the inborn criminal, the indeterminate
sentence is the only scientific one. With some
such basis as this, Mr Jay’s proposal could be put
in force, because there would remain a class that
goes wrong not because it has any peculiarly
vicious tendencies, or is morally sinning, but
because it is unequal to life's circumstantial
struggle.

““ Do not go blundering on with your wretched,
silly little vindictive teasing, short sentences.
Admit that when persons have no mental or moral
equilibrium, they need judicious treatment. Do
not send them to prison, which will only make
them worse (these supra-feeble-minded), cost you
a great deal, and probably infect others; send
them to a . . . settlement, that is, a place which
has been specially selected ’’ where these may be
interned. ‘‘ Let this . . . settlement be ruled and
governed and conducted and carried out on
reasonable and sensible methods. In such a place,
THE CHECKING 175

the inmates will be made as comfortable as
possible, and yet there will be a possibility of
easy recourse to punishment when necessary.”
Parentage will be denied them, but they * will
be occupied as far as possible with remunerative
employment . . . they will be comfortably fed and
fairly housed, and never allowed to return to the
outside life for which their very natures entirely
unfit them.’’*

Would not the whole of society be lifted up by
the removal of those who form centres of anti-social
activity just as the removal and isolation of fever
patients has been beneficial to the community?
Professor McDougall (National Welfare and
National Decay) has suggested a colony for those
with minds too advanced for the present social
conditions.

Dr F. H. Hayward? has put forward a scheme
which ought to be supplementary to Mr Jay’s, a
scheme by which he hopes that the whole standard
of Public Opinion can be raised. Put briefly,
his position is that we must create, not leave to
chance, a common denominator of Public Opinion,
if only it can be made a high one. This is to be
done in two ways, to have on school and college
walls of all grades, corresponding records
of information. These will give sometimes

* The Social Problem, pp. 94-5.
2 The Spiritual Foundations of Reconstruction.

 
176 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

pictorially, sometimes simply in words, the
fundamental data, on all subjects and always
proportioned to the child’s stage of development,
and so when it leaves school and college, it will
have familiarly accepted in its mind the common
accepted doctrines of aesthetics, science and
philosophy. To this passive influence of educa-
tional school and college atmosphere, he would
add a more active side, in his idea of ‘‘ School
Celebrations.”” The examples which he gives are
rather samples of his own personal choice, and he
recognises that these would have to be chosen by
a responsible body of informed opinion and would
vary in different nations. He claims that this
would give to younger generations a high jumping
off ground of common memories acquired under
conditions of high emotion, or at any rate of
dignity and impressiveness, which would make
quackery and lowness of life less able to hold their
own, and be a means of social unification and
invigoration.

Professor McDougall would, perhaps, achieve
this uplift through the skilful arranging of people
into groups, and Mr Ross! by the strengthening of
the individual and the home factor. Can we take
these and other suggestions and form one large-
minded general policy so as to avoid some of the
greater evils of our time?

'E. A. Ross, Social Psychology.
CHAPTER XVII

GREGARIOUS MOTIVES NOT ENOUGH FOR SOCIAL
EVOLUTION

WE saw in last chapter that there are certain
means at the disposal of society to check the
danger of mass retrogression. The position would
seem to be as follows:

The ideals of both Aristocracy and Democracy
are good but they have never been carried out
because of the geneocratic influence of family
affection which causes parents and members of
one family to support family influence against
an aristocratic selection, based on qualitative and
efficiency principles.  Seneocratic, nepotic, and
autocratic tendencies all are apt to work against
a true aristocratic selection and against any true
democratic principle of responsible, skilled voting
power.

This is not to say that geneocratic, seneocratic,
and other influences have not their place; on the
contrary it is because they have such power and

177 M
178 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

rightful position in society that they easily gain
an influence of more than what is due to them.
But as all governments have been hitherto geneo-
cratic ones, modified by seneocratic, autocratic and
nepotic influences, it is clear that some psycho-
logical study of the healthy social control of the
impulses which make these tendencies so strong,
is urgently needed. There is hope that such social
control is not an impossible task, in spite of the
age-long dominance it will have to contend with,
because hitherto human beings have considered
themselves primarily rational creatures instead of
being chiefly desire-driven ones. A change of our
educational, industrial, economic and political
systems and a more truly Christian interpretation
of religion might alter the ascendancy of our
desires, calling out and stimulating what has
hitherto been suppressed. Mr Jay’s proposal for
colonies for the supra-feeble-minded and Professor
McDougall’s for super-citizens might both have
to be considered, as well as the skilful grouping of
citizens, so that herd tendencies may not be so
powerfully retrograde, and Dr Hayward’s jump-
ing-off ground of culture and Mr Ross’s develop-
ment of domestic life are all valuable suggestions
and ought to receive the most careful considera-
tion. But these are all negative in this that they
are restraining and conserving, not initiating
influences, how are we to supply those initiatory
GREGARIOUS MOTIVES 179

forces of leadership' and the necessary ideals of
personal and civic life so vital to progress from so
useful but negative a background.? Mr Jay and
Professor McDougall would rely on negative and
positive aspects of eugenic teaching, and it has
already been pointed out that these influences
would supply higher ranges of potentiality, but
“the question must be asked potentiality for what?
Some order of social effort, some satisfying
personal and social ideal is required to mark
out a positive path or at least a direction
for society to travel towards. The gregarious
impulses in themselves supply no such
motives.

Let us come back once more to Sir Hubert
Parry’s reference to a crowd or assembly, already
quoted ; he speaks of the feeling of being one of
many as an ‘‘ exhilaration ’’ even if it is one of
a thousand dolts and it ‘‘ thrills’ one. To the
person who has any humanity about him it gives
‘‘ extra vitality.”” This was also Emerson’s view.
This feeling alternates with the complemental
feeling of solitude, but neither supplies motives of
progress.

! Social leadership is, of course, an inquiry in itself.

? Dr Hayward claims for his proposals that they would
increase initiative, and they include a suggestion for
giving the enthusiast, the visionary and the genius a
platform by which the multitude may be reached. He

claims also that the ‘‘ crank ’’ would become more normal
in truly scholastic surroundings.
180 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

Gustave Le Bon says® ‘‘ The most careful
observations seem to prove that an individual
immersed for some length of time in a crowd in
action, soon finds himself—either in consequence
of the magnetic? influence given out by the crowd,
or from some other cause of which we are ignorant
—in a special state. . . .”?

There are various views as to how this state is
produced ; Le Bon, W. J. Long and others favour
some undiscovered telepathic influence, and I do
not think this view is one which ought to be dis-
carded lightly. Tarde attributes the chief influ-
ence to imitation, and Trotter and McDougall to
a definite herd feeling which is inborn in us. It
is to me probable that all three of these assump-
tions are true. And when Herbert Spencer takes
the contrary view and asserts that it is only the
sum of individual activities, this attitude is also
useful as showing how very different individual
reactions are which produce the crowd feelings.
In my own case I seem to be conscious of them
all: (1) I feel the ‘‘ draw *’ and the ‘‘ repulsion ”’
of the multitude. (2) I have less often felt the

YThe Crowd, p. 11, 1907.

3 That is, telepathic or other unknown communicative
influence.

* Myers and one or two other writers link the herd
feelings with a call of the subconscious mind; it would
then generally, but not always, be of low origin and
influence.
GREGARIOUS MOTIVES 181

imitative impulse, but I can easily imagine the
strength of the feeling, it is not foreign to my
nature. (3) I can incipiently realise a sudden
motive of the many transmitted to me so that I
might be carried away and feel a blind panic, or a
blind surging rage, or a blind and sentimental
pity. Something of this, when it is skilfully led,
is seen in the theatre when laughter or fear or
pathos become sentimentally contagious. (But
this may be imitative as well as telepathic because
one looks at faces which are expressing the same
feelings as one’s own and reacts to them.) But
I am also very powerfully affected by what every
lecturer, worthy of the name, knows as atmosphere,
and this seems telepathic; I feel it as a distinct
feeling, I respond to it as a distinct feeling, and
I do not think that Le Bon is wrong in claiming
a distinct and high place for it. In my own mind,
it is an important factor. (4) I can understand
Spencer’s dead-weight feeling by the sum of
numbers. Probably we are very unequally served
by these feelings or states.

Now while it is vitally important that we should
know more of these herd impulses, it is also neces-
sary that we should see how they act, and the point
on which all social psychologists are agreed is
that they alter our personalities. The individual
does not behave as he would without them.

Le Bon asserts that ‘‘ The conclusion to be
182 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

drawn from what precedes, is that the crowd is
always intellectually inferior to the isolated
individual, but that, from the point of view of
feelings, and of the acts these feelings provoke, the
crowd may, according to circumstances, be better
or worse than the individual.”

This seems to me a fair statement if it is added
that the tendency of the feelings and acts of the
crowd is downward unless it can be inspired
by good leadership. Ross, Trotter, and even
McDougall seem broadly to concur in this, though
they each put in important caveats.

When all is said, therefore, experience is on the
side of the view that all Public, Mass influences,
if left to themselves, have the downward not the
upward pull.” The little boy or girl before he or
she enters school is by almost universal admission
of the better parent more refined than after
doing so. Industrial and other later public
influences are not more favourable.  Gregarious
motives are not enough for social evolution.
CHAPTER XVIII

THE NEO-INDIVIDUALISTS’ SOCIAL SYNTHESIS AND
ARISTO-DEMOCRACY

THE rationalistic theory of democracy would then
appear to have no basis; it seems to rest on a
desire for equitable justice, a justice of similarity
of circumstances and on a denial (which is not
true to nature and never can be true) of the
temperamental differences in one sex and in the
two sexes. It has served its day. Life is bigger,
more incalculable, more aspirational and inspira-
tional than this. Society is a gigantically complex |
growth. And yet, why do people long for this
like treatment when it can only lead to a terribly
dull monotony; is it due to a blind feeling, which
serves as a natural check to the lusts of power
and place, a feeling so natural that the idea of its
“ not being fair ”’ seems to rise almost spontane-
ously in the schoolboy’s and schoolgirl’s minds
and even in the mind of the child? While
inequality must exist and is indeed the life of
183
184 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

society, is it the artificial, not the natural inequality
which is the chief source of social bitterness?

For a century and more a better teaching has
been active; it is time it became a general one.
“I am a democrat wishing to advance, and to
make others do the same, in the name of these
three sacred words—Tradition, Progress, Associa-
tion. I believe in the great voice of God which
ages bring to me through the universal tradition
of the human race. It tells me that the Family,
the Nation and Humanity are the three spheres
through which human individuality must labour
to the common end.” So wrote Mazzini' nearly
a hundred years ago, and the best part of his
teaching was devoted to trying to separate the
‘ rationing,” ‘‘ levelling out >’ teaching of com-
munism from true democracy which seeks a wider
and fuller outlook for the individualities of each and
all. And Mazzini, if ever there was one, was a
people’s man. I pass over deliberately a quantity
of fine and noble similar teaching to come down
to our day.

In 1916 Benchara Branford, a member of an
active group of social students, wrote: ‘‘ The
stress we lay upon the increasingly great need of
evolving a . . . world view is not to be confused

! Mazzini, Life and Writings, Vol. vi., pp. 194-5, Smith
Elder.
* Janus and Vesta, pp. 21-22.
NEO-INDIVIDUALISTS’ SYNTHESIS 85

with the advocacy of a weak and vacuous cosmo-
politanism of which the ordinary type is the
relatively unreal and doctrinaire state of mind,
thin experience and resultant view of the man who
ignores the . . . interests of his own nation, per-
haps even prides himself on having crushed his
nationality beneath recognition under a supposed
cosmopolitan temper.

“It is not cosmopolitanism in this effete sense
that is urged. Rather have we in mind the once
great meaning of the word, as represented by a
Socrates in ancient times or a Franklin in modern,
whose cosmopolitanism was a veritable world
citizenship. :

‘“ This implies, when interpreted in its proper
historical valuation and evolution, that the attain-
ment of a world citizenship is an arduous, slow
and deliberate achievement, never fully and com-
pletely realised. A true cosmopolitan, whether
man or woman, must be first a devoted member
of the family, then a good citizen in the life of
the town and region, an ardent patriot, a cultured
member of the Western or Eastern institution
woven into the particular civilisations in which he
or she is born. Thus in its various degrees of
development, life is filled in each period to the
brim with rich experiences of the gentle ties of
family, of the progressive activities of the city,
of the conservative growth of stability of the
186 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

surrounding rural region, so that the very soil of
the native land becomes part of the soul, and the
millennial institutional traditions and sentiments of
his own race and the racial families nearest to his
own grows up within the citizen luxuriantly, if
also under due discipline.

‘““ It is only then, when such a man (or woman)
feels that for any one of these he would, if necessary,
sacrifice his life, and still more for all—it is only
then that he is prepared to begin his apprentice-
ship to that august assemblage of human beings,
past, present and future, which we know as
citizens of the world of humanity, in which, if the
interests and ideals of the family are fundamental,
and the honour of one’s native land central, the
interests and ideals of the whole of humanity, past,
present and future are supreme. . . .”’

““ There is mo point of the unending spiral of
inter-relations vast and continually increasing at
which one can stop and say this is the one vital
element. . . .

““ This it is that we mean by world citizenship.”

This is finely and scholarlily stated; it is a
scientific idealism to which Michelet, Mazzini, as
well as Kipling at his best, and Comte and Spencer
could have complementally subscribed. It is the
wiser view, it must hold the future.

I will quote one more reference—the three
references are quite unrelated—to voice this modern
NEO-INDIVIDUALISTS' SYNTHESIS 187

wiser outlook. Paul Revere Frothingham,' in
‘“ Every one a Beam ’—says ‘‘ the most primitive
and fundamental, sacred, fruitful and enduring
growth that civilised existence knows, and on which
all our civilisation rests—I mean the group which
comes together in the family and establishes the
Home . . . and what is the secret of all secure,
and permanent, and happy family existence? It
is the secret of a community of interests: a com-
bination of desires, hopes and efforts. . . . No
doctrines of a ‘‘ new womanhood,’’ and no duties
of a larger sphere of influence, can do away with
an old and fundamental fact.

¢“ These laws are writ in human hearts by Him who built
the day:

The Pillars of the universe not deeper based than they.”

““ And where there is failure . . . where
unhappiness comes in at the door, and discontent
is seated moodily beside the fire . . . is when the

man is bent on ‘ getting ’ something, and is not
prepared to give; it is when the woman hopes to
secure something, and is not inclined to make a
sacrifice—it is when both, or either, fail to bear
or bring the necessary beam—it is then that the
shelter of the roof gives way, that the structure
of the home is not secure.

! Anniversary Sermon (British and Foreign Unitarian
Association) May, 1021, reported in Z%e Inquirer for 21st
and 28th Mav
188 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

‘“ The Family, however, is the first group only,
and the smallest in the social organism. Beyond
it lie the community, the city, the State, the nation
and the world itself. And in each of these the
same great principle holds good. It is a constant
process of enlargement, and of the application of
service and unselfishness to wider circles of relation-
ship. Many people will do for their own, give to
their own, who bear no beam on their shoulders
to add to the strength, the beauty and the safety
of the larger whole of which they form a part.

‘‘ Inter-nationalism does not mean anti-national-
ism. Instead of meaning the absence of national
feeling, it would imply the development of national
feeling.

““ We have an immense amount to learn in
these respects; and an equally immense amount
to unlearn. Tolstoy, so great in many respects,
so small in others, could speak of Patriotism as
a ‘survival of barbarism.” He claimed it the
enemy of Christianity . . . and condemned it as
presenting the chief impediment to a union among
nations. The trouble was, however, that Tolstoy’s
understanding of patriotism was as limited and as
superficial as his understanding of Christianity.
He was too nearly in agreement with the cynical
Voltaire. For, according to Voltaire, patriotism
consisted ‘in loving your own country, and in
wishing other countries ill.” But it was another
NEO-INDIVIDUALISTS’ SYNTHESIS 189

Frenchman, of a later day, who upheld a nobler
and much larger thought. ‘ You ask me,” wrote
de Musset, ‘ if I love my country? and I answer:
Yes! But I love also Spain and Italy and I do
not hate either Australia or India.’

‘““ There is, therefore, such a thing as a ‘ New
Patriotism,” which is being built up slowly, and
that we hope will not be cut off in its early youth.
And it is new in this that it consists not in loving
your own country any less, but in appreciating,
honouring, and loving other countries more than
has been our custom in the past.”

In these voices speak the truer, the real demo-
cracy of the spirit; they express too not merely
the path of human but also of individual personal
progress ; our individual minds, if we do not shut
them in, grow in this same direction towards the
benignant, kind, genial old age.

Professor Urwick following in the steps of Max
Miiller’s teaching has in his Message of Plato
helped us towards the vision of East and West,
so necessary to a true and lasting universalism and
if he favours the East a little too strongly, it is
that his own life has taught him how worthy is
the life of contemplation and that action is only
the preliminary to it. His plea is that the best
ideals of the West are for youth, and maturity,
embodying as they do the wish for achievement
and action, but the best ideals of the East flow
igo SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

from a source of inward being, and are for old
age and its enlarged but restful vision.

To quote Mr Branford once more: ‘“ We see
the whole human race in gradual co-operation,
albeit doubtless with frequent periodic reverses

. . towards a world polity of citizens offering
increasing scope alike in duties and in rights to
child, woman and man, family, city, region,
nation, and race, and doing justice to each accord-
ing to its nature and needs.”’?

This sequence of expanding conceptions is the
fundamental one of neo-individualism and the
newer aristo-democratic spirit, and it is hoped that
neo-communism which stresses the gregarious
appeal will not find its teaching antagonistic to it.

It is necessary to remember that while for
importance the order is from individual, family,
city, region, nation, race, towards humanity, and
is increasingly collective in its comprehensiveness,
for excellence the voice of the genius raises an
individual ideal that the collective aim follows and
becomes increasingly individual.

What is before us if we accept such an appeal ?

A subtle series of scientific studies on tempera-
mental, national, and racial issues, investigating
the susceptibilities and the interactions of these,
and a tremendous personal and social change in

* Janus and Vesta, xvii and xviii.
NEO-INDIVIDUALISTS’ SYNTHESIS 19

social theory, a recognition that not the equitable
but the inequitable, if it is natural, is right and
that finding the harmonies in the inequalities of
life, not the simple melodies of unison, is our
great ideal.
CHAPTER XIX
THE SOCIAL ORIENTATION OF INDIVIDUAL DESIRE

IT may be urged that this plea of neo-individualism
is merely a sentimental one, that no evidence has
been brought forward beyond that of the existence
of sentimental feelings in favour of the home, the
nation, the race, and humanity. The obvious
answer to make to this criticism is that it is senti-
ment we are investigating. The claim of the
modern social student is precisely this, that the
contempt for mere sentiment has been overdone, if
it has ever been justified, as the power of senti-
ment in directing social activities has been largely
overlooked. The power is often not less when the
sentiment works quite blindly, or, if it is not quite
blind, sophistically, than when it is aided by real
intellectual vision. This is the curious position
that one needs to examine carefully. The impres-
sive reality is:—that family, national, racial and
human feelings have existed side by side without
any logical or scientific claim to support them, and
have been as strong as if they were so supported,
192
THE SOCIAL ORIENTATION 193

or even stronger in their blind uncalculating and
often intellectually contradictory ‘‘ urges.” Our
Bible with its seemingly discordant patriarchal,
national, racial and cosmopolitan passages, which
originated with the Jews and has been accepted
by the Western Gentile for nearly two thousand
years, is a case in point, but it does not stand
alone, other Bibles bear like impresses upon them.
And as Herbert Spencer points out' Europeans
have taught to their children, for hundreds of
years, Greek and Christian principles side by side,
without pausing to see to what extent they were
consistent, because both appealed to them. The
‘“ mere sentiment ’’ argument is one that history
does not support, sentiment is often age-long in
its strength and dominating assertiveness. This
is the impressive reality which the social student
of to-day means to investigate, and it is
humiliating but true that thought, however clear,
scientific, and convincing without the support of
feeling, is passive, and when thus supported with
feeling is apt to be biassed. The neo-individualist
position is not, therefore, less significant if it is
supported by sentiment, as it undoubtedly is, but
it also stands on a very firm scientific basis, and to
meet the intellectual criticism, I will briefly refer
to the arguments in favour of it.

(1) It is said that the family origin of society is

' The Introduction to Sociology, Chapter VIII.
N
‘194 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

at least doubtful. The family origin may be, but
not the later developments of the family spirit in
society. These are patent and undeniable. Even
as regards origin the family claim has a better case
than the herd one.

If there are traces of a very early general descent
through the female line, and if this suggests that,
as in many animals, the paternal influence was at
first not recognised, this might mean that the
female was in a herd of human beings and was
generally protected by the herd and that the family
unit came later. Even if this be so, the family
spirit is still a very early one. But there are
weighty arguments against it. Almost all dis-
orders of the mind arouse solitary habits in the
deranged person, the lunatic is not more but less
communal; this suggests that the earliest human
state was more solitary, not more herding, and
that the diseased mind reverts to it. Early man
was a large, wild animal; before he made use
of weapons, a relatively defenceless one, and he
was probably arboreal, as the anthropoid apes
still are, he would more readily escape the
carnivora if the family grouping, as in Gorilla and
Chimpanzee, etc., prevailed rather than the herd.
But even if the herd was the original source of
social unity, the family type came soon after and
it has dominated every form of human government
and social life ever since, so that individual living,
THE SOCIAL ORIENTATION 195

family living, state living, human living, does
broadly represent the order of development in the
individual and the nation.

The immature mind is mainly self-centred, family
ties follow, then exclusive national ones, with civic
responsibilities, and the inclusive human appeal
comes later still.

History, on the whole, supports the neo-
individualist claim.

(2) A criticism from an opposite quarter may
accept this family influence in the past but ask
Will it continue?

Let me refer to some of the great influences
that must give support to the belief in the value
of the home in all ages that are not decadent
ones.

1. The physical elemental needs of early
human life demand the family basis. The pre-
natal existence of the new human life depends
broadly on the dietetic and assimilative capacity
and healthfulness of the mother and on a certain
absence of violence and strenuousness in her bodily
motions. Psychological disturbances are also
principal causes of dyspepsia and ill-nourishment,
and as such are hurtful to the woman. And what
is dangerous to the child-bearing woman is at the
same time hurtful to the development of her later
nursing capacities. The home, if it is a good one
(and it is this ideal we should strive for), is the best
196 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

and perhaps the only satisfactory place where these
health needs can be complied with.

2. In the Nursing or Infancy period the mother
ought to supply her child with its natural food.
There is no other efficient substitute. And to keep
this food of good quality, the same conditions as
in (1) are required.

3. The Weanling (or Toddling) stage, from the
end of infancy (about nine months) to established
childhood (about three years), is a dependent help-
less period that needs personal and individual
attention, and it is doubtful if this can be given
without the interest of parental feeling. In any
case, why should a salaried woman do for money
what a mother ought to do from desire and duty ?
Lack of delicacy in the handling of a child, in
toilet and other attentions, has frequently laid the
foundations of bad habits and even gross
immorality in later years.

4. Up to seven years of age, at least, children
are extremely susceptible to many infectious and
contagious diseases, and all massed institutional
life favours the catching of such ailments. It is
neither necessary nor advisable for children to be
subject to what are called ‘‘ childish complaints ”’
and to have these in succession one after another.
Galton and Newsholme and others have shown
that diseases probably devitalise permanently.
For about the first seven years of life the child is
THE SOCIAL ORIENTATION 197

far better in a good home where a good mother
and father are effective isolation officers.

5. Is there no place for affection of parent and
child? Are we growing so material that it needs
a scientific psychological demonstration (a demon-
stration which can easily be given) of the value of
endearment and touch in developing not only the
child’s but also the parents’ minds? And if
affection has its value, then the home must persist.

6. Spencer has pointed out that individuation,
the process by which a mind individualises itself,
is not the same as selfishness. The one is noble,
the other ignoble, and individuation with its mind-
unfolding process necessarily reveals and unlocks
each citizen's highest powers which can be used,
when unlocked, by the nation. The home is the
only place in which this process can be realised.

7. Comte has pointed out that in economic
inquiries consumption and skilled shopping for
individual needs are the keys to the study of the
development of the State. The home is the basis
for this. Michelet, Ruskin, and Morris, as well as
other writers, have all seen in machinery a danger
that mechanism may make us slaves. Machinery
can do this only if individual taste is not cultivated.
Large-scale production is able to create a surplus
of labour, and by excessive standardisation of
machinery and repetitive duplication of what is
produced it allows an extreme specialisation of
198 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

workmanship so that labour becomes mechanical
and monotonous. The home is a check to this.

8. Locke claimed society is for the individuals
who compose it (if society is not for them, what :s
it for ?), and, without a home, society has no place
for individual self-expression.

9. In early Victorian thought the home is spoken
of as a fledgling ground of initiation for the young
life before the cold plunge into the world—this
position has not been disproved—and it is also a
character-formative influence.

10. Religion acts individually and repose or
meditation is needed by all of us, and incidentally
also for bodily health. The home could give this
opportunity.

11. Confucius in past times, Mazzini, Spencer,
Locke, etc., in recent times, have pointed out that
the noblest bonds of hierarchialism are forged
in “ the home: (a) Filialism passing to (b)
Fraternalism as society develops.

12. Affection and Faith demand the home ideal :
Love in a cottage is better than stalled luxury and
ease without it. The marriage tie inviolate is a
Faith ideal. Many people have pointed out that
the marriage vow would be uninspiring if it read :
““ For better, not for worse; for richer, but not for
poorer; in health, but not in sickness; till con-
venience do us part.” And no one yet has been
able to dissolve and blot out memories and mind
THE SOCIAL ORIENTATION 199

associations by Act of Parliament, nor cause
children once born of two parents to be re-born of
one of these with another.

13. Dunlop, Ross, McDougall, etc., have
pointed out that in the growing collective or mass
life of a State the individual influence of the home
is required to prevent people becoming too sheep-
like and thinking as their morning and evening
papers, trades unions, clubs, colleges suggest.

14. The whole trend of mind development and
reform favours impulsive and therefore individual
treatment rather than compulsive and collective.
One need only mention Pestalozzi, and the need
of mothers capable of educating their children in
their early years; Froebel and Groos, and the value
of spontaneous play; Pestalozzi, Seguin, and his
disciple Montessori, and the need of individual
tuition; Hill and Connolly, who maintained that
asylums should be more like homes and less like
barracks; the cottage asylum and hospital move-
ment; Howard, the Elmira system, and later the
Borstal plan of treatment for crime; persuasion
rather than cruelty towards animals; the milder
aspect of religion, which aims at threatening less
and converting more.

Every one of these fourteen headings, and each
of them is in itself a large and important subject
of study, favours the home and voluntaryistic
appeal.
200 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

Moreover, the scientific fields of Personal,
Public and Racial hygiene now being worked out,
make it practically certain that this neo-individua-
list claim of a widening outlook which commences
with the home and widens towards the region, the
nation, and the world, is the natural order of
human development and is the way in which a
world humanity will at last be built.

The real difficulty of the neo-individualist is the
social orientation of individual desire. Desire is
so powerful that it can only be checked by the
intensifying of some opposing desire. We have
already seen that the social forces behind such
words as aristocratic and democratic are not aristo-
cratic and democratic ones, but geneocratic,
seneocratic, nepotic and autocratic.

1. Family influence is universal in all states.

2. Seniority of service nearly always takes pre-
cedence over quality of service.

3. The use of ‘“ a friend at court’ is also
universally recognised.

4. Last, but not least in influence, the lust for
power, place and precedence over our
fellows, the ambitious motive of human life,
is that which of all motives has been the
most ruthless.

Socially to orientate these feelings in all classes

of the nation (for no class is exempt from their
dangerous dominances) and in both sexes (because
THE SOCIAL ORIENTATION 201

women are even more influenced by feelings than
men) is the great task for the psychological and
religious students of the future. :

Of these four feelings, let me only illustrate one.

Christ in common with, but more strongly than,

other world religious teachers emphasises the
danger of the ambitious desire for precedence. He
teaches that in order to be spiritual we must
conquer and subordinate this lust for power. We
must cease to wish to sit in high places, to be seen
of men, to be gratified by applause, to long for
notoriety ; what we should seek is the growing,
expanding spiritual life in our own natures and a
sympathy with a like growth in the natures of
others.
. William Law! long ago urged ‘The first
temper that we try to awaken in children is pride;
as dangerous a passion as that of lust, we stir
them up to vain thoughts of themselves, and do
everything we can to puff up their minds with a
sense of their own abilities.

‘“ And when we have taught them to scorn to
be outdone by any, to bear no rival, to thirst after
every instance of applause, to be content with
nothing but the highest distinctions; then we
begin to take comfort in them. . . .”

Is such an education calculated to make a people
contented with the simple but magnificent fruits of

! Serious Call, Chapter XVIII.
202 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

knowledge and also make it favourable to peace,
or will you not have in the scorn to be outdone,
the source of personal, sex, class and national
rivalries which make war inevitable?

Spencer! also says ‘‘ It is not, as we commonly
suppose, that there are no governments but those
of monarchs, and parliaments, and constituted
authorities. These acknowledged governments
are supplemented by other unacknowledged ones
that grow up in all circles, in which every man or
woman strives to be the king or queen, or lesser
dignitary. To get above some and be reverenced
by them, and to propitiate those who are above
us, is the universal struggle in which the chief
energies of life are expended. . . . We are none
of us content with quietly unfolding our own
individualities to the full in all directions.”

Speaking of the evils of education and educators,
Mr Clutton-Brock says: ‘‘ It is not merely the
vulgar will to power over the child, but something
far subtler and more unconscious. It is the
constant tendency (of teacher and parent) to
associate education with status, to regard it as a
means not to freedom of the spirit but to some kind
of superiority.’’?

““. .. There is always the same strain after
show, and the same endeavour to make a little

* Education, Chapter 1.
2 Richmond, Permanent Values in Education, p. Xiv.
THE SOCIAL ORIENTATION 203

look a mickle. The children of five hundred a
year must look like those of a thousand; and those
of a thousand must rival the tenue of little lords
and ladies born in the purple.’

While writing this volume, I thought of one who
in America was called ‘‘ The White Mr Long-
fellow.” I thought of him as he wrote about the
abolition of war and the substitution of education
for arsenals and forts. I thought of him in his Dante
circle, in the quiet authority which he wielded in
the best cultured society that America has yet seen.
And I thought this lover of children and youths
and maidens, this teacher of goodwill towards men
could never have followed other than an ambition-
less path, and then I turned to the larger Life,
which Samuel Longfellow wrote of Henry Wads-
worth. And this is what I found dated 3ist
December, 1824. As a youth he wrote to his
father, *“ I will be eminent in something,’’ and his
father did not discourage the assertion, and he
wrote again and yet again in the same spirit. If
men like Longfellow? are ambitious, can we hope

! E, Lynn Lynton, The Girl of the Period, Chapter I. On
Modern Mothers.

2 Sir Charles Lyell says in his autobiography, speaking
of one of his earlier schools: ¢ There was nothing at
Radcliffe’s for exciting the emulation of the boys, and as I
had an aversion to labour, which nothing but a stimulus
could overcome, I learned but little during the two years I
was at school ”’ (Life, Letters and Friends, Vol. i., p. 10),
On the other hand it was said of John Austin, ‘‘The
204 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

to make the ordinary man and woman less so?
At any rate, this difficulty of desire is the problem
in democracy; it is the problem in the study of the
crowd and social psychology, it is the problem of
the ideal of peace. 1920 was the centenary of the
birth of Herbert Spencer, the greatest theoretical
advocate for peace the world has ever seen. His
Education is a call to the peaceful life, his eighth
chapter of the Study of Sociology is a plea that a
““ Religion of Amity ’’ may one day, and will one
day, supersede the past age-long and powerful
‘““ Religion of Enmity,”” his hope of ‘ In-
dustrialism > was that it would supersede
‘“ Militarism,’ and he is the greatest co-operative
teacher relying not on force but on common desire
to unite us that the world has yet known. And at
the end of the most terrible and costly war in all
history, the world passed him by. 1921 was the
centenary of the death of Napoleon and almost
every important paper and monthly magazine
throughout the world paid its tribute to his
memory; was it to the ‘‘ Code Napoleon,” by
which alone he has any claim to a great, other
than a notorious, social memory? Was it even

highest applause or admiration of ignorant millions would
have failed to give him the smallest satisfaction. The
approbation of the few whose judgment he respected or
the persuasion that his labours tended to general utility
were the only stimulants which affected him’ (Preface

Austin, Jurisprudence).
THE SOCIAL ORIENTATION 2035

his military skill? No, it was to Napoleon, the
Conqueror. Can we, dare we, be sure that the
Kaiser’s centenary will not also be celebrated?
Such, alas, is human weakness.

There has recently been a glove fight in
America for the ‘‘ Championship of the World.”
Thousands and thousands, including women,
watched the fighting, and a world, a whole world,
was informed and almost kept breathless for the
result. It is not reasoning which will conquer
this war desire. It is the uplifting of better desires
in our minds which alone can exalt the higher and
abase, not debase the lower. But this is a vast,
a gigantic problem of applied Social Psychology.

Gissing? says truly, ‘‘ it is so difficult (for human
beings) to associate, however transitively, and even
under the most favourable conditions, without some
shadow of mutual offence. Consider the differ-
ences of task and of habit, the conflict of pre-
judices, the divergence of opinion (though that is
probably the same thing),? which quickly reveal
themselves between any two persons brought into
more than casual contact, and think how much
self-subdual is implicit whenever for more than an
hour or two, they co-exist in seeming harmony.
Man is not made for peaceful intercourse with his
fellows; he is always self-assertive, commonly

* George Gissing, Ryecroft Papers, Section VI, Summer.
* The Gladstonian claim.
206 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

aggressive, always critical in a more or less hostile
spirit of any characteristic which seems strange to
him.’>

The average man or woman is always at open
discord with someone; the great majority could
not live without oft-recurrent squabble.

Allowing for this quarrelsomeness in in-
dividuals, ‘‘ it passes the wit of man to explain
how it is that nations are ever at peace! ”’
Though Gissing’s position could not be denied by
the experienced mind, it yet raises the three issues
which open the door for hope: (1) Is this quarrel-
someness less than it was? (2) Do desires which
arouse conflict between individuals yet serve some
larger social and harmonious end? (3) Is there
a psychology of amity and enmity so that a culture
of the former may be founded upon it?

Ambitious and competitive motives are not
necessarily bad ones, their uses have already been
referred to; they have given grades to society,
have caused the specialisation of industry and in
early times have been a great incentive to all forms
of labour, and are seen as helpful influences even
in the lives of such unlikely examples as Sir
Charles Lyell and Longfellow. But to make these
yield to higher motives as age in the individual
and in society advances; this is what is now
needed.

Is it possible to throw a sufficient weight of
THE SOCIAL ORIENTATION 207

public opinion behind the social reformer to check
motives so strong as the desire to rise in life or
the family feeling which resorts to favouritism and
gives its relatives and friends the ‘fruits of
office’? Can we in face of such paramount feel-
ings insist on impartiality and qualitative efficiency
in public affairs? These feelings are quite
unquestionably widespread over all classes of men
and women throughout the world, and have been
the ruling influences in the past. There is, more-
over, a tremendous weight of indifference and
detachment to be overcome. Can we have love
and friendship in private affairs without its inevit-
able favouritism affecting public ones? Can we
have disinterestedness and impartiality and yet
avoid dilatoriness in human effort? To ask these
questions seriously is to see at once how futile
‘ Rationalism ’’ is as a political doctrine. What
is wanted is obviously not the destruction of the
family spirit, nor the denial of the true value of
seniority, nor even the destruction of the glory in
power and precedence, but some psychological
orientation of such tremendous motives so that
their anti-social tendencies may be checked.

Many cultured minds sensitive to moral and
social changes are beginning to feel ‘‘ that the
whole world seems to have reached a great moment
of transition. It seems to have got near the top
of a narrow pass which will look over into a new
208 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

era.”’! Professor Gilbert Murray and Mr Tawney
have ably maintained this view. Is it that we are
near a new vision of human effort and that we are
coming to realise at last, perhaps without knowing
it, that the desires of our minds, the driving
impulses of our minds are what we need to
investigate and understand ?

If we are to recognise individual differences to
the full, we must abolish rivalries and must find
in our differences not the sources of hostility, nor
misunderstandings, but mutual help and strength.
A change of orientation must therefore come if
the new view is to survive and this will begin with
education. .

Dean Inge rightly says that the ‘‘ examination
system flourishes best where there is no genuine
desire for mental cultivation.”’®? It must be so, for
the method of a curriculum is non-individual and
its aim is to confer financial material benefit rather
than cultural enlargement of the mind. ‘The
whole of school life is stimulated by the principle
of competition, and kept together by a healthy and,
on the whole, a kindly self-assertion. . ..” Is
this, as Mr W. W. Vaughan asks, the best kind
of education? Mr Vaughan in his very interest-
ing paper is only allying himself with and
restating what Pestalozzi, Seguin and Spencer

! Times Literary Supplement, 6th January, 1921.
2 Cambridge Essays on Education, 1917.
THE SOCIAL ORIENTATION 209

claimed, that development not competition should
be accepted, at least as the ideal of all cultural

effort. M——

This also seems to be the dream at the back of
Mr Tawney’s mind; he assumes that industry and
even national ideals must follow the path not of
rivalry and emulation but of self-development.

Mr Vaughan truly says this issue raises a
dilemma never yet solved by man and ‘‘ the rulers
find it more difficult than the ruled.”

Man has reached a stage when he is both con-
scious of his power and also of a desire to resist
any form of compulsion where it affects himself.
The hope is, without ignoring human unity, that
he will vse this power to favour a widespread
personal diversity. But up to now, man has been
spurred on by rivalries, excited by and stimulated
and quickened through competition. In order to
check these ambitions in himself he has sought to
weaken home and sex ties, to give all labour a
common remunerative value, to destroy alike
individualism and nationalism. The difficulty is,
nature will not permit this; if sex affection is
weakened, sex-licence is encouraged; if the
incentive of labour is removed, laziness is
encouraged ; if individualism is destroyed, self-
respect goes also; and nationalism is so strong that
it will not be suppressed.

The better way, indeed the only way, is to

oO

N
210. SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

change the precedence of our own desires. We
cannot make men or women feel what is not already
existing in their natures, but we can emphasise,
in educational, industrial, political and domestic
life, an unemphasised aspect. We can change the
accent of our lives and in doing so produce a
silent revolution. Are we equal to our task?

I passed a man in the street, his clothes were
tattered, his face wore an expression of utter
indifference to circumstance, which it was easy to
see revealed the whole state of his character. Self-
respect and incentive were alike gone, even his
appeal for alms lacked all eagerness. He stood
there apathetic.

On the opposite side of the road a young girl
of about seventeen walked with an egoistic deport-
ment, which it was no less obvious was not only
native to a side of her disposition but bred in her
by her home and school.

How to take from one the indifference which his
failure had given him and from the other the lust
of pride and self-seeking which made her blind to
all else and give both alike true self-respect is part
of this great question of social orientation. Is it
an impossible aim ?
CHAPTER XX

SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS, AND THE NEED FOR
PERSONAL AND SOCIAL HUMAN IDEALS

IN attempting to bring together a summary of the
main conclusions of this volume, I hope that the
general ideas thus placed in their relation to each
other which animate the modern schools of social
thought will stand out more sharply than could
be the case when each of these ideas was considered
separately and a little more in detail. I have not
discussed questions of terminology (as in the
vague use of the word will, and the almost as
unsatisfactory use of the term instinct) but apart
from this I have tried to give a representative
picture.

I. THE PROSPECT

A new social territory has been discovered with
vast horizons—this is the cardinal, the under-
lying or foundation teaching of the new school

of thought. All other aspects of the question
211
212 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

grow out of this. All simple rationaiistic theories
of government or of a people’s ways stand con-
demned in the light of the complex human
_ motives with which modern psychology shows
human and other animal beings to be possessed.
The behaviour of all living creatures is
complex, that of man most of all, and he
therefore must exert complex social interactions.
‘“ Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing
you make of »’ society, when you would pluck
out the heart of its mystery with a few trite
assumptions.

II. INTELLECTUAL NAMES FOR (GOVERNMENTS
WHICH ARE DESIRE-FASHIONED

Aristocracies and Democracies imply very high
aims, wide culture, and noble daily standards of
life in a people who could embody their ideals in
public iaws, customs and precedents.

_~ No real aristocracy and no real democracy have
ever yet existed in this very imperfect world of
human affairs. The characteristics of peoples of
all ages and climes have hitherto been those
dependent on fashion, custom, and desire-
behaviour (which is, for the most part, self-
seeking) as well as on gregarious and solitary
inclinations. But custom, desire and sociabiiity
are not the ordinary seed-grounds of culture or
SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS 213

unselfish duty, and what is conspicuous about
any political controversy is the prevalence of
catch words and catch phrases which often
obviously contradict each other and yet none the
less pass as currency for thought and scholarship,
and of biases so obvious that party, party-loyalty
and partisanship are the deciding factors of the
situation. It is not merely that such a situation
could not produce an atmosphere where the best
would be selected and, perhaps, bred, as in
aristocracy, and that it still less could produce a
condition where all citizens were able to vote
responsibly and intelligently as in democracy, but
on the obvious face of the situation it is not
rationalism and truth which prevail, but dominant
and assertively intense desire-forces.

III. Rear PouriticaL PoOwEeRs

Aristocracy and democracy have been used,
perhaps subconsciously, as words which have
cloaked the real political powers of family
affection with its resuiting favouritism, and the
ambitious motive of lust for power and precedence.
These motives are not evil, they can, however,
be easily perverted, and in the main it is true that
all societies have been geneocracies with a
hierarchical ordering, such ordering being the
result of interacting rival personal ambitions,
214 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

Political rule thus emulatively established gains
and maintains its power by supplying the appetite-
demands of the peoples that have been so
governed. .. The words ** Reason,” *‘‘ Truth,”
~ “Culture ”’ and ‘‘ Morality ”’ have been used
sophistically. They have been the weapons of
~ controversy, but the real combatants which have
used such weapons have been rival desires. This
is why even such a giant mind as Aristotle’s did
not place in the forefront of his Ethics and
Politics the issue of slavery, and why slavery
lasted into the nineteenth century as a discuss-
able question. This is why the tremendous
indifferentism of the masses in all occupations and
their desire for sensationalism has never received
any serious study to this day, and why in all
political issues, the most obviously central posi-
tions, which disinterested thought would suggest,
are so frequently overlooked. G. Stanley
Hall in Senescence, 1922, p. 4350, says: “It
would seem that young people have no business
with the contemplation and meaning of death and
that it is absurd for them to occupy themselves
with it.”’ But it is unnatural not absurd; on the
contrary, if we were rationally-minded it is just
what young people would be occupied with, but
they are not emotionally awakened and so pass it
by. Desires are the real combatants and the
weapons which these sophistically use are |
SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS 215

Reason, Truth, Culture and Morality, though
under Time’s guidance, the weapons take on life
and the temporary desires are drowned in
oblivion.

IV. THE UNSCIENTIFIC EXALTATION OF
REASONABLENESS

Yet men and women have always liked to
believe that they are dominantly reasonable and
intellectual beings and the sublime teaching of
Socrates rests partly on such an erroneous ideal.
And when at the beginnings of The Reformation
and The Renaissance a larger humanity led the
age to the problem of the people it was assumed
that rational teaching was all that the people
required. Then followed the hard lesson of
experience and a reaction from such a simple,
child-like belief. Teaching has not brought
wisdom to the masses; desires are still the real
combatants in the social arena; and it has come
to be seen that popularity and vulgarity have
more than a linguistic relationship. At first the
proprietors of newspapers and ‘theatres and
publishers of books were blamed for the tone of
the Press, the Drama and the Book World, but it
is now realised after repeated trials and failures
that demoralisation of effort seems always to
accompany the successful popularisation of a
216 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD

cause. This is not a discovery for social students
to bemoan, it is rather one for them to investigate.
The conclusion, however, has led in recent times
to the breakdown of the rationalistic democratic
theory, to the realisation that the direct voice of
the people is not the voice of God; that the low
general levels of intelligence and the still lower
levels of scholarship in a people are not sufficient
to make its opinion of value, and that even if
such were not the case, its desires would outrun
its intellect. The first essential in modern
political inquiry is the abandonment of the
assumption that human beings are dominantly
reasonable, /and the second is that with this
abandonment the student has to begin his
inquiries afresh, and step into unfamiliar scenery
and to need new charts, new sign-posts and new
methods of exploration, and new political theories
like those of Rousseau, Hegel, and Gladstone, to
interpret the new situation. For if the people
does not have the intelligence to govern itself; if
desires, not intellect, control the political fore-
ground; what prevents this foreground from
becoming chaotic? Is there in human desire some
larger purpose not yet discovered? Is there some
providential law which harmonises in the process
of time what seems discordant at the moment?
These and other questions are raised because it
is realised that the old view of an enlightened
SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS :17

people being able to govern itself is a double
delusion. The enlightened people have never
existed, and, in this intellectual and disinterested
sense, probably never will exist, but if they did,
the intelligence of skilled men and women who are
enlightened is insufficient to foresee the future
needs of society unless there be scientific social
laws to help them. Hence the social student is
driven back from his former belief in the sufficiency
of human minds to think out consciously a social
policy towards a recovery of confidence in and reli-
ance upon nature, and he begins to see, in the
background of life, scientific social laws directing
the more obvious human foreground, and begins to
look dimly to a great horizon for the discovery
of some purpose not our own making for a
righteousness and a destiny which our rivalries,
bickerings, jealousies and scurrilities as well as
our unintellectual amenities could not reach.
Such a student does not see human life more
meanly because he sees it thus more truly; life is
greater, and because it is greater, more complex,
more difficult to interpret; and indirect theories
of government are required to supersede the easy
rationalistic ones that men like Locke and
Bentham, great leaders as these were, formed.
Austin felt the rationalist position to be a weak
one and he presaged the new outlook, but he did
not live to see it developed.
218 SOCIAL LIFE AND THE CROWD
V. THE Task To BE ACCOMPLISHED

Rousseau, Hegel and Gladstone are examples
of those who are forming the scaffolding for a
much more scientific and a much nobler structure
of political theory, and it begins to be seen that
this new structure must have its foundations laid
in Social Psychology and Crowd Studies. The
first floor of this building will be occupied by
builders of a new communism who study the
laws of the psychology of human gregariousness,
but this alone is insufficient; mass-retrogression
is a real danger, and although there are checks
to this retrogression, they are restraining not
progressive influences, so that gregarious motives
are not enough for social evolution. Therefore
the second floor of the social building must be
given over to the neo-individualists who by
orientating individual desire will help to make us
all better and more progressive citizens, holding
up to us ideals of personal living and civic living
that being based on Nature and Science will
quicken and call our better impulses into activity
and dominance.

VI. THE NECESSARY IDEALS

Meanwhile what is required are ideals, of social
evolution, of personal evolution (or scientific ideals
SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS 219

of the stages of social and individual life) as
science reveals them, and an appeal to the =
voluntary principle which shall encourage all
human effort. In order to see and believe in the
realisation of such ideals, it is necessary to
remember that what makes the true social reformer
is the ability which can see, as Hegel pointed out,
shining through incidental evils, which recur age
by age, and evolving out of them, the deeper and
lasting realities of human goodness.
INDEX

AIKIN, JOHN, 52

Alison, 37

Ambition or lust of power,
a distinctive human char-
acteristic, 147-9; its
orientation, 201

Anstey, F., 6o

Archer, W., 49
ristocracy, a name not a
reality, 16-7, 177; used in
many senses, 18; not anti-
democratic, 19

Aristotle, 65

Austin, 3, 18, 50, 6s, 74-8;
desire governing reason in
social life, 137; and Parry,
203-4

Autocracy, 17; anti-demo-
cratic, and Hobbes, oo;
other views, 108

Avebury, Lord, 20
BEHAVIOUR, 13°53, 131}
instinctive and discern-

ing forms, 142

Bennett, A., and the Press,
44

Branford, Benchara, 184-6,
190

Bryce, Viscount, 37

Burns, R., 29

CLUTTON-BROCK, 202
Communism, old and new,

155-8

220

 

Comparison of Rousseau’s,

Hegel’s and Gladstone’s
views, 81-2, 122-5
Complexity of society, 15,
60-74, 81-8

Comte, A., 65, 7
Contradictory wants, 193
Creighton, Bishop Mandell,

64

Crowds and The Masses, 13;
their desires, 40-50; dis-
regard of the esthetic, 56;
credulity, 56-7; inertia and
stupidity, 93-5, 130; com-
tentiousness, 112; herd
and slave qualities, 131

Cuvier, 142

DARK, SIDNEY,
Daubenton, 142
Democracy, its intellectual
impotency, 11-2; its pene
cution of genius, 13,
its unreality, 17; the as
of an indirect governing
principle, 6-g; a new
perspective, 69-74, 81-8;
Impulse Theory, 163
Desire’s sophistical power,

12-3, 76-7
W., 62

Draper, J.
Dunlop, J., 94, 130-1, 142

34-5

ELEMENTS of the Study, 140-
53
INDEX 221

Elliot, Ebenezer, 47, 49

Emerson, W., 132-4

Equity, its future subordin-
ation, 183, 190-1

FAGAN, J. B., and the
Press, 44

Fisher, H. A. 1.., 95-9, 161-2

Forms of political influence,
23-4

French Revolution, the
starting point of Crowd
Psychology, 129

Frothingham, P. R., 187-9

GALTON, Sir Francis, 131

Geddes, P., 111

Geneocracy, 10-23; its
orientation, 201

Giddings, F. H., 142

Gissing, G., 306, 37, 60,

205-6
Gladstone, W. E., 64, 72,
110-21, 123-5

Gregarious motives, analysis
of, 180-1; not progressive,
181-2

Hapow, W. H., 63, 103

Haldane, Lord, 104-6

Hamerton, P. G., 131

Hatch, E., 37

Hayward, F. H., 108, 175-6,
178-9

Hegel, 32, 33. 72; real and
incidental wills, 97-108,
122-5; and Emerson, 133

Hobhouse, L. T., 33, 43,
101

Hodges, F., 155-7

Holmes, O 2s 07 ;

Human qualities of mind,

145 Cs

Huxley, T. H., significance
of names, 16-7, 64, 65;
Master-Gardener, 82-3, 110-
11

 

IGNORANCE of the study,
141-2

Instinct, 141-2

Interactions of men and

women, 12-13
Intuitions, distinctive human
characteristics, 145-7

JAMES, W., and Gladstone,
115, 119

Jay, Osborne, 173-5, 178-9

Johnson, Samuel, 21, 100

KANT, 13; 132, 141

Kepler, 70

Kipling, R., 50, 72; and
Burns, 171

Law, W.,
201-2
Yecky, W. E. H., 37, 108,

113-5
Lessing, 25
Locke, ]., 25, 20, S09, go
Lowell, J. R., 102-3
Lyell, Sir C., 71

and orientation,

McDouGALL, W.,
175, 178-9

Maine, Sir H., 72

Martineau, J.,
Arnold, 169g .

Master-principle in
81-8

Mathews, B., 28

Maudsley, H., 63

Mazzini, J., 26, 20, 31, 64

Mendelssohn, 63, 103

Michelet, J., 33, 34

Milton, J. 1., 37

Milton, John, 25, 26, 20, 41-
43, 48, 61

Montesquieu, 72

Morgan, C. Lloyd, 131, 142

Morley, H., 53

Mott, Sir F., 57

150, 167,

100; and

society,
222

Miiller, Max, and Gladstone,
117-8, 120

Murray, G., 41, 60, 208

NE0O-COMMUNISTS, 159-63; in-
sufficient basis of, 163-6

Neo-Individualists, 184-91

New England writers and
rationalistic democracy, 26

New political perspective, 13-
15, 09-74, 81-8, 121, 151-4,
183-4, 1Q0-I

Newton, Sir Isaac, 70

Norris, F., and stone,
119

OPTIMISM,
ST

Owen, R., 52

Pane, T., 128

Parry, Sir H., 136-8, 168-9,

179

Pebody, C., 43, 48

Politics, a training needed
for its practice, 65

Press, the, 40-50

Price, R., 33, 120

Proctor, A., an unknown
factor in society, 84-5

a false form of,

Psychology, personal and
social as distinct forms,
05-6, 122

RABBLE, 13, 24

Rationalism dominated by
feeling, 24; its insuffi-
ciency, 25-30, 69-78; a
passing theory, 87-8; man
though the only reasoning
creature, yet not rational,
140-51; unscientific exalt-
ation of rationalism, 215

Reactionaries, 34-9

Reid, Sir A., 157

Rivers, W. H. R,, 20

Ross, E. A., 176 : :

Rousseau, 32, 88; his social
wills, 89-96, 122-5; an
Emerson, 133

 

INDEX

SALEEBY, C. W., 45, 161

Scott, Robertson, 167

Seneocratic influences, 23

Shakespeare, 14-5, 16, 28,
29, 70

Sharp, D., 138

Simon, Sir John, 93

Social wills, 89-96

Socrates, 89, qo

Spencer, H., 65, 72, 100, 202,

203-4
Stubbs, Bishop, and Glad-
stone, 116
Sully, J., 44
Symonds, J. A., 29
Symons, A., 28

TAMMANY and geneocracy, 22

Tansley, A. G., 162

Tarde, 131, 143

Tawney, R. H., 208-9

Tayler, |: T., 130

Tayler, J. L., The Study of
Individuals, 13

Taylor, Jeremy, 41, 8&6

The Times, 61

Thought and will as dis-
tinctive human character-
istics, 145

Trotter, W., 150

IINITARY: or harmonious
ideals of social needs, 140
UrWwick, E.M., 139

VAUGHAN, W. W., 208-9

Vico, 72

WaLLAS, GRAHAM, 32, 37,
138

War as a revealer of low
mind standards, 04-5

Washington, Booker TT;

45-6
White, A. D., 62
«« Wills,” definitions, 97
Wordsworth, 32
 
    

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