This largely increased reading, due to reduction in price, spread of railroads, rural delivery, and lessening hours of industry, is often spoken of as making men more alike in their views. Tarde spoke of the “public,” which he defined as the people sitting at home reading newspapers, as a mental collectivity because of this supposed tendency. Christensen confirms this when he says that the people reading the newspapers are “a scattered crowd.” The usually accepted opinion is that the daily press is making us more and more into crowds, but that is not my experience. A man with his daily paper may be obeying the group law or the crowd law as he unites his own thoughts with the thoughts of others or as he is merely amenable to suggestion from others, and it seems to me we see a good deal of the former process. The newspaper brings home to us vividly what others are feeling and thinking. It offers many suggestions; we see less and less tendency to “swallow these whole,” the colloquial counterpart of the technical “imitation.” These suggestions are freely criticized, readers do a good deal of thinking and the results are fairly rational. The reader more and more I believe is selecting, is unifying difference. The result of all this is that men’s minds are becoming more plastic, that they are deciding less by prejudice and hypnotism and more by judgment. And it must be remembered that a man is not necessarily a more developed person because he rejects his newspaper’s theories than if he accepts them; the developed man is the group man and the group man neither accepts nor rejects, but joins his own thought with that of all he reads to make new thought. The group man is never sterile, he always brings forth.[68] Democracy can never mean the domination of the crowd. The helter-skelter strivings of an endless number of social atoms can never give us a fair and ordered world. It may be true that we have lived under the domination either of individuals or of crowds up to the present time, but now is the moment when this must be deliberately challenged. The party boss must go, the wise men chosen by the reform associations must go, the crowd must be abandoned. The idea of the All has gripped us—but the idea has not been made workable, we have yet to find the way. We have said, “The people must rule.” We now ask, “How are they to rule?” It is the technique of democracy which we are seeking. We shall find it in group organization. ----- Footnote 67: Arcos, Romains and Vildrac are the chief of these. Romains, who has written “La Vie Unanime,” is the most interesting for our present purpose, for his togetherness is so plainly that of the herd: ... “quelle joie De fondre dans ton corps [le ville] immense oú l’on a chaud!” Here is our old friend, the wild ox, in the mask of the most civilized (perhaps) portion of our most civilised (perhaps) nation. Again