Page:The Psychology of Jingoism.djvu/30

in a common action that is not their mere individual choice. This passion of the mob, implying an abandonment of self-control by the individual, is a fact too well recognized to require proof. But its nature and origin are both obscure and interesting. This war in South Africa casts a powerful searchlight upon the nature of the large, and in some ways highly-organized, crowd which we call the British nation. The suddenness, the size, and the manifold sensationalism of the occurrence are the precise conditions requisite for testing the mass-mind of the people. What the orator does for his audience the press has done for the nation; it has injected notions and feelings which, instead of lying in the separate minds of their recipients, have bubbled up into enthusiastic sympathy, and induced a community of thought, language, and action which was hitherto unknown. The conditions of the case do not allow us to regard this common conduct as a mature fruit of the reason of the nation; it must evidently be regarded as an instinctive display of some common factors of national character which lie outside reason, and belong, in ordinary times, to the province of the sub-conscious. Whatever qualities of deliberation and calculation may have been present in the