Moral traditions are the guides which no one can afford to neglect. They are in the mores, and they are lost in every great revolution of the mores. Then the men are morally lost. Le Bon says, writing of the French Revolution: The people may kill, burn, ravage, commit the most frightful cruelties, glorify its hero to-day and throw him into the gutter to-morrow; it is all one; the politicians will not cease to vaunt its virtues, its high wisdom, and to bow to its every decision. Now in what does this entity really consist, this mysterious fetich which revolutionists have revered for more than a century? It may be decomposed into two distinct categories. The first includes the peasants, traders, and workers of all sorts who need tranquillity and order that they may exercise their calling. This people forms the majority, but a majority which never caused a revolution. Living in laborious silence, it is ignored by historians. The second category, which plays a capital part in all national disturbances, consists of a subversive social residue dominated by a criminal mentality. Degenerates of alcoholism and poverty, thieves, beggars, destitute "casuals," indifferent workers without employment--these constitute the dangerous bulk of the armies of insurrection.... To this sinister substratum are due the massacres which stain all revolutions.... To elements recruited from the lowest dregs of the populace are added by contagion a host of idle and indifferent persons who are simply drawn into the movement. They shout because there are men shouting, and revolt because there is a revolt, without having the vaguest idea of the cause of the shouting or revolution. The suggestive power of the environment absolutely hypnotized them.