For instance, there is liberty. Every crowd demands it when it is seeking power; no crowd permits it when it is in power. A crowd which is struggling for supremacy is really trying to free itself and as many people as possible from the control of another crowd. Naturally, the struggle for power appears to consciousness as a struggle for liberty as such. The controlling crowd is correctly seen to be a tyrant and oppressor. What the opposition crowd does not recognize is its own wish to oppress, hidden under its struggle for power. We have had occasion to note the intolerance of the crowd-mind as such. A revolutionary crowd, with all its lofty idealism about liberty, is commonly just as intolerant as a reactionary crowd. It must be so in order to remain a crowd. Once it is triumphant it may exert its pressure in a different direction, but the pinch is there just the same. Like its predecessor, it must resort to measures of restraint, possibly even a "reign of terror," in order that the new-won "liberty"--which is to say, its own place at the head of the procession--may be preserved. The denial of freedom appears therefore as its triumph, and for a time people are deceived. They think they are free because everyone is talking about liberty. Eventually some one makes the discovery that people do not become free just by repeating the magic word "liberty." A disappointed faction of the newly emancipated humanity begins to demand its "rights." The crowd hears its own catchwords quoted against itself. It proceeds to prove that freedom exists by denouncing the disturbers and silencing them, if necessary, by force. The once radical crowd has now become reactionary. Its dream of world emancipation is seen to be a hoax. Lovers of freedom now yoke themselves in a new rebel crowd so that oppressed humanity may be liberated from the liberators. Again, the will to power is clothed in the dream symbols of an emancipated society, and so on around and around the circle, until people learn that with crowds freedom is impossible. For men to attain to mastery of themselves is as abhorrent to one crowd as to another. The crowd merely wants freedom to be a crowd--that is, to set up its own tyranny in the place of that which offends the self-feeling of its members.