It is the ignoring of the group which is retarding our political development. A recent writer on political science says that a study of the interaction between individual and crowd is the basis of politics, and that “the will of nations or states is the sum of individual wills fashioned in accordance with crowd psychology.” In so far as this is true it is to be steadily opposed. Many writers imply that we must either believe in homogeneity, similarity, uniformity (the herd, the crowd), or lose the advantages of fellowship in order to discover and assert our own particularistic ideals. But our alternatives are not the individual and the crowd: the choice is not between particularism with all its separatist tendencies, and the crowd with its levelling, its mediocrity, its sameness, perhaps even its hysteria; there is the neglected group. Democracy will not succeed until assemblages of people are governed consciously and deliberately by group laws. We read, “No idea can conquer until a crowd has inscribed it on its banner.” I should say, “No idea can finally conquer which has not been created by those people who inscribe it on their banner.” The triumph of ideas will never come by crowds. Union, not hypnotism, is the law of development. There can be no real spiritual unity in the mass life, only in the group life. Whether the people of America shall be a crowd, under the laws of suggestion and imitation, or follow the laws of the group, is the underlying problem of to-day. The promise for the future is that there now is in associations of men an increasing tendency for the laws of the group rather than the laws of the crowd to govern. Our most essential duty to the future is to see that that tendency prevail. As we increase the conscious functioning of the group we shall inevitably have less and less of the unconscious response, chauvinists will lose their job, and party bosses will have to change their tactics. People as a matter of fact are not as suggestible as formerly. Men are reading more widely and they are following less blindly what they read.