An excellent illustration of this crowd-dominance crops up in my afternoon paper.... It appears that in certain parts of the country artisans, by drinking too much alcohol, are reducing their capacity of doing their proper work, which happens at the moment to be of great importance to the country at war. Many interferences with liberty are permitted in war time by general consent. It is accordingly proposed to put difficulties in the way of these drinkers by executive orders. One would suppose that the just way to do this would be to make a list of the drinkers and prohibit their indulgence. But this is not the way the crowd works. To it everyone of its constituent members is like another, and all must be drilled and controlled alike.... Whatever measure is adopted must fall evenly on all classes, upon club, restaurant and hotel as upon public house. Could anything be more absurd? Lest a gunmaker or a shipbuilder in Glasgow should drink too much, Mr. Asquith must not take a glass of sherry with his lunch at the Athenæum!... We live in days when crowd dominion over individuals has been advancing at a headlong pace.... If he is not to drink in London lest a Glasgow engineer should get drunk, why should not his eating be alike limited? Why not the style and cut of his clothes? Why not the size and character of his house? He must cause his children to be taught at least the minimum of muddled information which the government calls education. He must insure for his dependents the attention of an all-educated physician, and the administration of drugs known to be useless. If the crowd had its way every mother and infant would be under the orders of inspectors, regardless of the capacity of the parent. We should all be ordered about in every relation of life from infancy to manhood.... Freedom would utterly vanish, and this, not because the crowd can arrange things better than the individual. It cannot. It lacks the individual's brains. The ultimate reason for all this interference is the crowd's desire to swallow up and control the unit. The instinct of all crowds is to dominate, to capture and overwhelm the individual, to make him their slave, to absorb all his life for their service.