During the time of my connection with the Cooper Union Forum, we have not had a crowd-demonstration in anything more than an incipient form. The best laboratory for the study of such a phenomenon is the political party convention, the mass meeting, or the religious revival. The orators who commonly hold forth at such gatherings know intuitively the functional value of bathos, ridicule, and platitude, and it is upon such knowledge that they base the success of their careers in "getting the crowd." The noisy "demonstrations" which it has of late become the custom to stage as part of the rigmarole of a national party convention have been cited as crowning examples of the stupidity and excess of crowd enthusiasm. But this is a mistake. Anyone who has from the gallery witnessed one or more of these mock "stampedes" will agree that they are exhibitions of endurance rather than of genuine enthusiasm or of true crowd-mindedness. They are so obviously manipulated and so deliberately timed that they can hardly be regarded as true crowd-movements at all. They are chiefly interesting as revelations of the general insincerity of the political life of this republic. True crowd-behavior requires an element of spontaneity--at least on the part of the crowd. And we have abundant examples of this in public meetings of all sorts. As the audience becomes crowd, the speaker's cadence becomes more marked, his voice more oracular, his gestures more emphatic. His message becomes a recital of great abstract "principles." The purely obvious is held up as transcendental. Interest is kept upon just those aspects of things which can be grasped with least effort by all. Emphasis is laid upon those thought processes in which there is greatest natural uniformity. The general, abstract, and superficial come to be exalted at the expense of that which is unique and personal. Forms of thought are made to stand as objects of thinking.