There is some truth in this criticism. In spite of the attempt of the famous author of crowd-psychology to give us a really scientific explanation of crowd-phenomena, his obviously conservative bias robs his work of much of its power to convince. We find here, just as in the case of Gobineau, Nietzsche, Faguet, Conway, and other supporters of the aristocratic idea, an a priori principle of distrust of the common people as such. In many passages Le Bon does not sufficiently distinguish between the crowd and the masses. Class and mass are opposed to each other as though, due to their superior reasoning powers, the classes were somehow free from the danger of behaving as crowd. This is of course not true. Any class may behave and think as a crowd--in fact it usually does so in so far as its class interests are concerned. Anyone who makes a study of the public mind in America to-day will find that the phenomena of the crowd-mind are not at all confined to movements within the working class or so-called common people. It has long been the habit of conservative writers to identify the crowd with the proletariat and then to feel that the psychology of the situation could be summed up in the statement that the crowd was simply the creature of passion and blind emotion. The psychology which lies back of such a view--if it is psychology rather than class prejudice--is the old intellectualism which sought to isolate the intellect from the emotional nature and make the true mental life primarily a knowledge affair. The crowd, therefore, since it was regarded as an affair of the emotions, was held to be one among many instances of the natural mental inferiority of the common people, and a proof of their general unfitness for self-government. I do not believe that this emotional theory is the true explanation of crowd-behavior. It cannot be denied that people in a crowd become strangely excited. But it is not only in crowds that people show emotion. Feeling, instinct, impulse, are the dynamic of all mental life. The crowd doubtless inhibits as many emotions as it releases. Fear is conspicuously absent in battle, pity in a lynching mob. Crowds are notoriously anæsthetic toward the finer values of art, music, and poetry. It may even be argued that the feelings of the crowd are dulled, since it is only the exaggerated, the obvious, the cheaply sentimental, which easily moves it.