The herd mind is essentially and inevitably a timid mind. Mr. Sinclair Lewis has analyzed it with relentless acumen in his amazing novel, “Babbitt.” The worthy citizen who gives his name to the story has reached middle age without any crying need to think for himself. His church and his newspaper have supplied his religious and political creeds. If there are any gaps left in his mind, they are filled up at his business club, or at his “lodge,” that kindly institution designed to give “the swaddled American husband” a chance to escape from home one night in the week. Church, newspaper, club and lodge afford a supply of ready-made phrases which pass muster for principles as well as for conversation. Yet stirring sluggishly in Babbitt’s blood are a spirit of revolt, a regard for justice, and a love of freedom. He does not want to join the Good Citizens’ League, and he refuses to be coerced into membership. He does not like the word “Vigilante,” or the thing it represents. His own sane instinct rejects the tyranny of the conservative rich and of the anarchical poor. He dimly respects Seneca Doane and Professor Brockbank when he sees them marching in the strikers’ parade. “Nothing in it for them, not a cent!” But his distaste for the strikers themselves, for any body of men who obstruct the pleasant ways of prosperity, remains unchanged. In the end--and it is an end which comes quickly--he finds that the one thing unendurable to his soul is isolation. Cut off from the thought currents of his group, he is chilled, lonely, and beset by a vague uneasiness. He yields, and he yields without a pang, glad to get back into the warm familiar atmosphere of class complacency, of smugness, of “safety first”; glad to sacrifice a wavering idealism and a purposeless independence for the solid substance of smooth living and conformity to his neighbours’ point of view.