[70] Democracy and Liberty, vol. i, chap. 1, page 25 and _passim_. Some of Lecky’s expressions, however, are more favorable to democracy. CHAPTER XIV DEMOCRACY AND CROWD EXCITEMENT THE CROWD-THEORY OF MODERN LIFE—THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CROWDS—MODERN CONDITIONS FAVOR PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTAGION—DEMOCRACY A TRAINING IN SELF-CONTROL—THE CROWD NOT ALWAYS IN THE WRONG—CONCLUSION; THE CASE OF FRANCE. Certain writers, impressed with the rise of vast democracies within which space is almost eliminated by ease of communication, hold that we are falling under the rule of Crowds, that is to say, of bodies of men subject by their proximity to waves of impulsive sentiment and action, quite like multitudes in physical contiguity. A crowd is well known to be emotional, irrational and suppressive of individuality: democracy, being the rule of the crowd, will show the same traits. The psychology of crowds has been treated at length by Sighele,[71] Le Bon[72] and other authors who, having made a specialty of the man in the throng, are perhaps somewhat inclined to exaggerate the degree in which he departs from ordinary personality. The crowd mind is not, as is sometimes said, a quite different thing from that of the individual (unless by individual is meant the higher self), but is merely a collective mind of a low order which stimulates and unifies the cruder impulses of its members. The men are there but they “descend to meet.” The loss of rational control and liability to be stampeded which are its main traits are no greater than attend almost any state of excitement—the anger, fear, love and the like, of the man not in the crowd. And the intimidating effect of a throng on the individual—the stage-fright, let us say, of an inexperienced speaker—is nothing unique, but closely resembles that which we have all felt on first approaching an imposing person; seeming to spring from that vague dread of unknown power which pervades all conscious life. And like the latter, it readily wears off, so that the practised orator is never more self-possessed than with the crowd before him. The peculiarity of the crowd-mind is mainly in the readiness with which any communicable feeling is spread and augmented. Just as a heap of firebrands will blaze when one or two alone will chill and go out, so the units of a crowd “inflame each other by mutual sympathy and mutual consciousness of it.”[73] This is much facilitated by the circumstance that habitual activities are usually in abeyance, the man in a throng being like one fallen overboard in that he is removed from his ordinary surroundings and plunged into a strange and alarming element. At once excited and intimidated, he readily takes on a suggested emotion—as of panic, anger or self-devotion—and proceeds to reckless action.