Little adapted to reasoning, crowds, on the contrary, are quick to act.As the result of their present organisation their strength has become immense.The dogmas whose birth we are witnessing will soon have the force of the old dogmas; that is to say, the tyrannical and sovereign force of being above discussion.The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings.
The writers who enjoy the favour of our middle classes, those who best represent their rather narrow ideas, their somewhat prescribed views, their rather superficial scepticism, and their at times somewhat excessive egoism, display profound alarm at this new power which they see growing; and to combat the disorder in men's minds they are addressing despairing appeals to those moral forces of the Church for which they formerly professed so much disdain.They talk to us of the bankruptcy of science, go back in penitence to Rome, and remind us of the teachings of revealed truth.These new converts forget that it is too late.
Had they been really touched by grace, a like operation could not have the same influence on minds less concerned with the preoccupations which beset these recent adherents to religion.
The masses repudiate to-day the gods which their admonishers repudiated yesterday and helped to destroy.There is no power, Divine or human, that can oblige a stream to flow back to its source.
There has been no bankruptcy of science, and science has had no share in the present intellectual anarchy, nor in the making of the new power which is springing up in the midst of this anarchy.
Science promised us truth, or at least a knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize: it never promised us peace or happiness.Sovereignly indifferent to our feelings, it is deaf to our lamentations.It is for us to endeavour to live with science, since nothing can bring back the illusions it has destroyed.
Universal symptoms, visible in all nations, show us the rapid growth of the power of crowds, and do not admit of our supposing that it is destined to cease growing at an early date.Whatever fate it may reserve for us, we shall have to submit to it.All reasoning against it is a mere vain war of words.Certainly it is possible that the advent to power of the masses marks one of the last stages of Western civilisation, a complete return to those periods of confused anarchy which seem always destined to precede the birth of every new society.But may this result be prevented?
Up to now these thoroughgoing destructions of a worn-out civilisation have constituted the most obvious task of the masses.It is not indeed to-day merely that this can be traced.
History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians.Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds.Crowds are only powerful for destruction.Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase.A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture--all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising.In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies.When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall.It is at such a juncture that their chief mission is plainly visible, and that for a while the philosophy of number seems the only philosophy of history.
Is the same fate in store for our civilisation? There is ground to fear that this is the case, but we are not as yet in a position to be certain of it.
However this may be, we are bound to resign ourselves to the reign of the masses, since want of foresight has in succession overthrown all the barriers that might have kept the crowd in check.
We have a very slight knowledge of these crowds which are beginning to be the object of so much discussion.Professional students of psychology, having lived far from them, have always ignored them, and when, as of late, they have turned their attention in this direction it has only been to consider the crimes crowds are capable of committing.Without a doubt criminal crowds exist, but virtuous and heroic crowds, and crowds of many other kinds, are also to be met with.The crimes of crowds only constitute a particular phase of their psychology.
