The philosophy of the all is supposed, by its advocates, to be opposed to the philosophy of the individual, but it is interesting to notice that the crowd theory and the particularistic theory rest on the same fallacy, namely, looking on individuals one by one: the crowd doctrine is an attempt to unite mechanically the isolated individuals we have so ardently believed in. This is the danger of the crowd. The crowd idea of sovereignty is thoroughly atomistic. This is sometimes called an era of crowds, sometimes an era of individuals: such apparent opposition of judgment need not confuse us, the crowd spirit and the particularistic spirit are the same; that spirit will continue to corrupt politics and disrupt society until we replace it by the group spirit. The crowd theory, like the particularist doctrine, has been strengthened by the upholders of the imitation theory of society. Many of our political as well as our sociological writers have seen life as some exceptional individual suggesting and the crowd following without reasoning, without effort of mind or will. Even Bagehot, who did so much to set us in the right way of thinking, overemphasizes the part of imitation. What he says of the “imitative part of our natures” is indeed true, but by not mentioning the creative part of our natures more explicitly, he keeps himself in the crowd school. It is true that at present the people are to a large extent a mass led by those who suggest. The suggestion and imitation of sociology are the leading and following of politics—the leadership of the boss and the following of the mass. The successful politician is one who understands crowds and how to dominate them. He appeals to the emotions, he relies on repetition, he invents catch phrases. The crowd follows. As long as the corner-stone of our political philosophy is the theory that the individual originates and society accepts, of course any man who can get the people to “accept” will do so. This is the fallacy at the foundation of our political structure. When we have a genuine democracy, we shall not have the defective political machinery of the present, but some method by which people will be able not to accept or reject but to create group or whole ideas, to produce a genuine collective will. Because we have invented some governmental machinery by which clever politicians can rule with the entirely artificial “assent” of their constituencies, does not mean that we know anything about democracy.