THE PERIL OF THE CROWD
The history of humanity is in large measure the history of its own
illusions. It has always been towards the mirage that men have tramped
with bleeding feet, only to strew the desert with bleached bones. One
great illusion has been that the golden age would come when the world's
autocracies gave place at last to democracy, and the will of the
multitude became law. It has come; democracy now wields the world's
sceptre. But alas! the golden age tarries, and the wistful doubt
arises whether the greatest peril confronting humanity may not be just
that--the sceptre in the hand of the unregenerate crowd.
I
For what we have to remember is that the crowd is by its very nature
and spirit capable of crimes such as the individual autocrat would
shrink from in horror. You may think that fantastic, and imagine that
a crowd consists, after all, of so many individuals, and that the
spirit of the crowd can only be the aggregate of the individuals
comprising it. But such a view is mistaken. The corporate spirit of
the crowd is not that of the units composing it. The best illustration
of this is the sudden reeling back into the jungle of a crowd when a
panic seizes them. Let the cry 'Fire' be raised in a crowded building,
and though the separate individuals be of the gentlest and most
considerate, yet instantly the crowd becomes daemonic, a wrestling,
writhing, struggling mass trampling the weak under foot, with no
thought but self-preservation.
There are various explanations. One is the law of sympathy, by which
an emotion is intensified in being shared. At the first cry of peril a
wave of fear passes through the crowd; and as each looks at the faces
around him he sees fear in every eye. The emotion suddenly unloosed is
like a river whose source is amid the silent hills, that gathers in its
course a thousand rills, until at last it sweeps in mighty floods
everything before it. Before the flood of terror generated by the
crowd all the decencies of civilisation vanish, and man becomes once
more the animal with but the one instinct--to fight for one's life.
And it is the same with anger. Let a skilled orator set himself to
rouse the passion of a crowd, and he will soon generate a spirit that
utterly obliterates the individual. Let him depict the wrongs they
suffer, and anger sweeps through the multitude, bending them to the
spirit of the orator as the corn field bends before the wind. Though
as individuals they may tremble in their shoes before their wives, now,
fused by rhetoric into one glowing mass, they are ready to loot a city,
pull down a Bastille, and level an absolutist throne with the dust.
But the great explanation of the spirit of the crowd as distinct from
the individual is that in the surge of contagious emotion generated by
the crowd the sense of personal identity is lost. Each only lives in
the crowd. And with the loss of identity comes the loss of personal
responsibility. I no longer stand alone to be judged for my acts; it
is the crowd who will be judged. The brake of personal responsibility
suddenly snaps. It is thus that a crowd will commit a crime that the
individual afterwards remembers with horror. Only a crowd could have
said: 'His blood be on us and on our children.'
In these last years the horrors that struck a chill into the heart of
the world were committed by the crowd. Suddenly in a Belgian village
the cry was raised, 'We are being sniped.' Instantly the soldiers were
swept by one emotion, and there rose the cry for vengeance. Then the
Mayor and the priest and a handful of village notables would be
gathered and shot. It was the rage and panic of a crowd seeking its
own safety through brutality.
It is plain, then, that the spirit of the crowd is something far other
than that of the individual, and is capable of the greatest crimes. It
was the crowd that compelled Socrates to drink the hemlock; it was the
crowd that overbore that poor vacillating weakling, Pilate, with their
monotonous chant, 'Crucify, Crucify'; it has always been the crowd that
has turned the sanctuaries into the nesting-places of owls and bats;
and the rock on which humanity may make shipwreck at last is just
this--the crowd. The millions of the dead have made the world safe for
democracy: the appalling question now is--Who will make democracy safe
for the world?
II
It is, however, only when the crowd is organised that the crowd becomes
a real menace. The horrors of war are unspeakable just because they
are the horrors committed by the crowd perfectly organised. A crowd
that has met for no purpose, and is a mere fortuitous concourse of
atoms, can do neither good nor harm. In proportion to its organisation
is the peril of the crowd. The power of the crowd that committed the
greatest crime in the history of the world lay in the fact that it was
perfectly organised. It was there in that chilly morning with only one
purpose, to cry, 'Crucify, Crucify.' Across all the mists of the
centuries we can see the organisers at work moving among the crowd.
They whisper to one group: 'He struck you in your property, overturning
the tables of your barter; if he lives you are ruined'; and to the
other: 'Remember his blasphemies: what he called himself.' ... And in
the trail of the organisers arose with intenser volume the cry,
'Crucify, Crucify.' It was the organised crowd that nailed the Son of
Man to the cross.
The fact that confronts us to-day is that the crowd is at last
perfectly organised; so perfectly organised that all the industry and
transport of three kingdoms can be stopped by the flash of an electric
wire. The crowd knows what it wants, and it has organised itself to
get it. But the crowd to-day is not an isolated handful such as that
of old in Athens or Jerusalem. The crowd is now world-wide and
international. What is shouted on the banks of the Volga in the
morning, at noon is shouted on the Clyde, and at the setting of the sun
in New York. For the cable and the telephone and the wireless have
woven humanity into one web. From the rising to the setting of the
sun, slowly but steadily on the forge the international crowd is being
hammered into the unity of steel.
In the old days the crowd had to storm their way into the presence of
their Pilates before they could cry 'Crucify.' But to-day the
organised, super-national crowd has changed all that. Now the crowd
can make itself heard across half the world. It assembles on the banks
of the Ganges and formulates its demands. The Turk must stay at
Constantinople! If not, well, there will be trouble. There in London
or Paris or Washington the modern Pilate receives his message. The cry
of the crowd hums in his ears across five thousand miles. 'What shall
I do with the bleeding and persecuted?' asks he. 'What is that to us?'
answers the crowd on the Ganges. And expediency gains the day as it
did in Jerusalem.... And fifteen thousand crosses arise with their
bleeding, agonising victims in Anatolia.... The governors of this
world have had but one rule in all the ages. Instead of fixing their
eyes on the stars they have gazed at the streets and have listened to
the crowd.... And the organised crowd can to-day make itself heard
round all the world as it cries, 'Crucify, Crucify.'
III
There is to-day one other added element in the peril of the crowd, and
that is the removal of the forces that formerly restrained and curbed.
The witness of history is that only one spirit can stand up against and
cast out the spirit of the crowd, and that is the spirit of religion.
I am not speaking of Christianity merely, but of religion in its
generic sense. There was only one force in Jerusalem on Good Friday
stronger than the thirst for blood, and that was the feeling that they,
the crowd, must not defile themselves ceremonially. Only one power,
religion alone, can cut the claws of the tiger in man.... In the midst
of the darkest deeds the thought of God's judgment-seat has ever and
again pulled humanity up.
But it is gone now--that sense of the Unseen Assize. Two generations
ago the international crowd of the learned (for crowds are of many
kinds), having discovered they could explain some processes, took it
for granted that nobody initiated these processes. With great
congratulations on the delivery of humanity from superstition, they
bowed the Creator out of His universe. In so doing they thought they
were ushering in a new world, where man would find deliverance from all
ill through the illumined brain.... Alas! for human hopes. The
learned have now gone back to the old truth--that this world is
organised spirit. But the sad thing is that though it is easy to
bamboozle the crowd, yet, once they are bamboozled, it passes the wit
of man to debamboozle them again. The scientific crowd bowed God out a
generation ago; but to bow Him in again is beyond them. And the spirit
of the crowd is left to-day without curb or chain from Siberia to Cork.
IV
There are few sadder thoughts than this--to think how the Church has
thrown away the power that once it knew how to use, the mesmeric
instinct of the crowd. 'In our State,' said an American, 'the devil is
fighting hard against the Church!' 'Ah! in Montana it is different,'
was the reply; 'there with us, the devil is running the Church.' It
would look as if it were even so. Wherever there was a crowd waiting
anywhere on the ministry of the Gospel, the devil set himself to break
up that crowd. He did it in ways most skilful. Had his true
personality appeared, he would instantly have been cast forth. It was
therefore apparelled as an angel of light that he set about the work.
He never failed to mouth high-sounding phrases. His favourite
watchword was principle. It did not matter much what the principle was
if only thereby the crowd could be broken up. In the beginning of the
seventeenth century the evangel of Jesus, that was committed to the
winds of Galilee and to a handful of peasants, was intellectualised
into a massive system of propositions that was to be for all time the
test of orthodoxy. One might smile if the fountain of tears lay not
here. That religion, which is like the wind blowing where it listeth,
was caught at last, and embodied in legal enactments and
formulas--sheltered behind statistics! Whoever heard of wind blowing
through legal documents? Build shelters and there is no more wind!
Yet these legal documents became the test of that religion which is
life and which is love. If any doubt was expressed about the use of
shelters when men needed the fresh breeze from heaven--then the devil
appeared and said that to abide by the shelter was a principle. Nobody
must touch or change that structure. If that be done, then those who
were loyal must separate. By a discreet use of the principle of
loyalty to confessions the devil broke up crowd after crowd of
worshipping Christians. There was nothing that he could not use for
that purpose. The doubt arose whether the all-loving Father could
really send babes to everlasting torments or decree that the vast
majority of mankind be tortured, for ever and ever. That was used to
break up the Church. A hymn, a paraphrase, the form of a prayer, the
posture at worship, a vestment--anything, everything, was good enough
for the devil's purpose. By these he achieved his ends. The crowd was
no longer to be found in one sanctuary. Here, where I write, in the
days of my boyhood the folk assembled in the open air for their great
Christian festival on the second Sunday of August. It was a moving
spectacle to see a couple of thousand people in the hearing of the sea,
with the hills brooding over them, raise a psalm to heaven. But that
crowd has been broken up into four fragments. There is no longer a
crowd. The devil has secured its overthrow. On the wave of an emotion
generated by a thousand hearts no soul shall again be wafted heavenward
in that green place. For the devil has seen to it that the thousand
hearts shall be no longer there.
V
There is a hopeful side to all this if only Christians will learn
wisdom. Instead of allowing the devil to break up congregations into
fragments, as he has done for a hundred years, what the Church must do
now is to provide the crowd which will exercise the powerful attraction
of the herd-instinct on the side of righteousness. The spectacle
presented in a poor and crowded district of a great city by competing
missions--Primitives, Wesleyans, Presbyterians, Catholics, Salvation
Army, and so on--each weak and ineffective--is heart-breaking. There
are so many of them that there can be a crowd at none of them. The day
of home-mission activities as now conducted is at an end.... At
Pittsburg I was taken to a meeting in a great auditorium, seated for
8000 people, where Gipsy Smith was carrying on a mission. The place
was crowded. There was a massed choir of a few hundred voices. After
a great volume of praise rolled heavenward, there came an atmosphere
vibrant with the sense of the Divine as prayer was offered. I never
heard Gipsy Smith before, and I was not prejudiced in his favour. But
his simplicity, his directness, his power of speaking straight home to
the heart, made me captive. Here was a master of crowd-psychology.
The Jesus whom this man preached was the elder brother, the lover of
men, the saviour from self. When the preacher asked those who desired
to follow and obey Jesus to stand up, they rose in hundreds. It almost
seemed as if the whole congregation were on their feet. The difficulty
when every force seemed to lift one up was in continuing to sit still.
This is the only mission that can to-day be effective--the mission in
which the mysterious powers latent sub-consciously in man are directed
heavenward. Instead of weak, isolated, competitive missions, if the
churches would organise home-missions after this order.... There in
Pittsburg, as in every city where men such as Gipsy Smith exercise
their ministry, the first requisite is that the churches organise to
provide the herd. Without the herd, the herd-instinct cannot operate.
First provide the crowd, and then the masters of crowd-psychology can
turn their faces heavenward. It will be a poor ruined world if the
crowd be left much longer as the monopoly of the devil. The laws of
crowd-psychology, which can crucify a Christ and turn an ancient
civilisation into carnage and animalism, can also shape humanity to the
noblest ends. By these same laws self-sacrifice, love, heroism,
idealism can make their irresistible appeal. Along this line victory
will come.