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conduct of the politicians, financiers, and journalists who were the direct conscious agents in bringing about the war, the popular approval of, and enthusiasm for, the war were not roused by any ratiocinative processes. The British nation became a great crowd, and exposed its crowd-mind to the suggestions of the press; these suggestions, taking form simultaneously in a million separate minds, gathered a force of consentaneous passion by private and public intercourse, and by degrees this crowd, or mass-mind, was possessed by a body of vague, but strongly-worded, doctrine about the war, and a powerful spirit of loyalty and animosity.

Our French psychologist described the mob-mind as reverting to the type of the savage or the child in intellect and morals, less amenable to ordinary rules of reason, more prone to sudden, uncontrollable gusts of passion, than its constituent units. Whether it be that the idiosyncrasies in a crowd cancel one another, and so the operative character is composed of common fundamental or race factors, or whether the superstructure which centuries of civilization have imposed upon the ordinary mind and conduct of the individual gives way before some sudden wave of ancient savage nature roused from its sub-conscious depths, need not concern