ABSTRACT
Certain acts of crowds are assuredly criminal, if considered merely in themselves, but criminal in that case in the same way as the act of a tiger devouring a Hindu, after allowing its young to maul him for their amusement. The usual motive of the crimes of crowds is a powerful suggestion, and the individuals who take part in such crimes are afterwards convinced that they have acted in obedience to duty, which is far from being the case with the ordinary criminal. The general characteristics of criminal crowds are precisely the same as those people have met with in all crowds; openness to suggestion, credulity, mobility, the exaggeration of good or bad sentiments, the manifestation of certain forms of morality. The crowd of murderers numbered some three hundred persons, and was a perfectly typical heterogeneous crowd. The rudimentary forms of reasoning, characteristic of the mind of crowds, are always to be traced in all their acts.
