As an example of the hatred of the political crowd for one who, having once put his hand to the plow and turned back, henceforth is no longer fit for the "kingdom," I quote the following from an ultraradical paper. It is hard to believe that this passage was written by a man who, in his right mind, is really intelligent and kind-hearted, but such is the case: AN EXPLANATION.--Owing to a failure of editorial supervision we published an advertisement of John Spargo's book on Bolshevism. We have returned the money we received for it, and canceled the contract for its future appearances. We do not pretend to protect our readers against patent-medicine swindlers, real-estate sharpers, canned goods prevaricators, ptomaine poisoners, fairy bond-sellers, picaroon nickel-pickers, subway ticket speculators, postage-stamp forgers, pie and pancake counterfeiters, plagiary burglars, lecherous pornographers, and pictorial back-porch climbers, plundering buccaneer blackmailers and defaulting matrimonial agents, journalistic poachers, foragers, pickpockets, thimbleriggers, lick-sauce publicity men, notoriety hunters, typographical body-snatchers, blackletter assassins, and promulgators of licentious meters in free verse. Against these natural phenomena we offer no guarantee to our readers, but we never intended to advertise John Spargo's book on Bolshevism. Here again, it seems, the reason for hatred is "self-defense." One important difference between the crowd-mind and the psychosis is the fact that while the psychic mechanisms of the latter serve to disguise the inadequately repressed wish, those of the crowd-mind permit the escape of the repressed impulse by relaxing the force which demands the repression--namely, the immediate social environment. This relaxation is accomplished by a general fixation of attention which changes for those who share it the moral significance of the social demand. The repressed wish then appears to consciousness in a form which meets with the mutual approval of the individuals so affected. Or, as I have said, the social environment, instead of acting as a check upon the realization of the wish-fancy, slips along in the same direction with it. Hence the will to believe the same, so characteristic of every crowd. As soon as this mutuality is broken the habitual criteria of the real again become operative. Every individual who "comes to" weakens the hold of the crowd-ideas upon all the others to just the extent that his word must be taken into account. The crowd resorts to all sorts of devices to bind its members together permanently in a common faith. It resists disintegration as the worst conceivable evil. Disintegration means that crowd-men must lose their pet fiction--which is to say, their "faith." The whole system elaborated by the unconscious fails to function; its value for compensation, defense, or justification vanishes as in waking out of a dream.