The character of the instinct of imitation and its influence on the
crowd has long been studied in animals, children, and even men, and has
been recognized as a fundamental trait of intellect and the prime
condition of all education. Later on its influence on crowds was
observed, and Napoleon said, “Les crimes collectifs n’engagent
personnes.” Weber spoke of moral contagion, and it has long been known
that suicide is contagious. Baer, in his book on “Die Gefängnisse,” has
assigned the prison-suicides “imitative tendency.” There is the
remarkable fact that suicides often hang themselves on trees which have
already been used for that purpose. And in jails it is frequently
observed that after a long interval a series of suicides suddenly
appear.
The repetition of crimes, once one has been committed in a particular
way, is also frequent; among them, the crime of child-murder. If a girl
has stifled her child, ten others do so; if a girl has sat down upon it,
or has choked it by pressing it close to her breast, etc., there are
others to do likewise. Tarde believes that crime is altogether to be
explained by the laws of imitation. It is still unknown where imitation
and the principles of statistics come into contact, and it is with
regard to this contact we find our greatest difficulties. When several
persons commit murder in the same way we call it imitation, but when
definite forms of disease or wounds have for years not been noticed in
hospitals and then suddenly appear in numbers, we call it duplication.
Hospital physicians are familiar with this phenomenon and count on the
appearance of a second case of any disease if only a first occurs.
Frequently such diseases come from the same region and involve the same
extraordinary abnormalities, so that nothing can be said about
imitation. Now, how can imitation and duplication be distinguished in
individual cases? Where are their limits? Where do they touch, where
cover each other? Where do the groups form?
There is as yet no solution for the crimino-political interpretation of
the problems of imitation, and for its power to excuse conduct as being
conduct’s major basis. But the problems have considerable symptomatic
and diagnostic value. At the very least, we shall be able to find the
sole possibility of the explanation of the nature or manner of a crime
in the origin of the stimulus to some particular imitation. Among
youthful persons, women especially, there will be some anticipatory
image which serves as a plan, and this will explain at least the
otherwise inexplicable and superfluous concomitants like unnecessary
cruelty and destruction. The knowledge of this anticipatory image may
give even a clew to the criminal, for it may indicate the nature of the
person who could act it out and realize it. Also in our field there
exists “duplication of cases.”
The condition of action in great crowds offers remarkable
characteristics. The most instructive are the great misfortunes in which
almost every unhappy individual conducts himself, not only irrationally
but, objectively taken, criminally towards his fellows, inasmuch as he
sacrifices them to his own safety without being in real need. To this
class belong the crossing of bridges by retreating troops in which the
cavalry stupidly ride down their own comrades in order to get through.
Again, there are the well-known accidents, e.g., at the betrothal of
Louis XVI., in which 1200 people were killed in the crush, the fires at
the betrothal of Napoleon, in the Viennese Ringtheater in 1881, and the
fire on the picnic-boat “General Slocum,” in 1904. In each of these
cases horrible scenes occurred, because of the senseless conduct of
terrified people. It is said simply and rightly, by the Styrian poet,
“One individual is a man, a few are people, many are cattle.” In his
book on imitation, Tarde says, “In crowds, the calmest people do the
silliest things,” and in 1892, at the congress for criminal
anthropology, “The crowd is never frontal and rarely occipital; it is
mainly spinal. It always contains something childish, puerile, quite
feminine.” He, Garnier, and Dekterew, showed at the same congress how
frequently the mob is excited to all possible excesses by lunatics and
drunkards. Lombroso, Laschi, etc., tell of many cruelties which
rebelling crowds committed without rhyme or reason.[307] The “soul of
the crowd,” just recently invented, is hardly different from
Schopenhauer’s Macroanthropos, and it is our important task to determine
how much the anthropos and how much the macroanthropos is to be blamed
for any crime.