ABSTRACT
A crowd is well known to be emotional, irrational and suppressive of individuality: democracy, being the rule of the crowd, will show the same traits. The crowd mind is not, as is sometimes said, a quite different thing from that of the individual, but is merely a collective mind of a low order which stimulates and unifies the cruder impulses of its members. The peculiarity of the crowd-mind is mainly in the readiness with which any communicable feeling is spread and augmented. Just as a heap of firebrands will blaze when one or two alone will chill and go out, so the units of a crowd "inflame each other by mutual sympathy and mutual consciousness of it." The individual engaged in private affairs and without the thrill of the common life is not more apt to be at the height of his mental being than the man in the crowd.
