able of the greatest crimes. It
was the crowd that compelled Socrates to drink the hemlock; it was the
crowd that overbore that poor vacillating weakling, Pilate, with their
monotonous chant, 'Crucify, Crucify'; it has always been the crowd that
has turned the sanctuaries into the nesting-places of owls and bats;
and the rock on which humanity may make shipwreck at last is just
this--the crowd. The millions of the dead have made the world safe for
democracy: the appalling question now is--Who will make democracy safe
for the world?

II

It is, however, only when the crowd is organised that the crowd becomes
a real menace. The horrors of war are unspeakable just because they
are the horrors committed by the crowd perfectly organised. A crowd
that has met for no purpose, and is a mere fortuitous concourse of
atoms, can do neither good nor harm. In proportion to its organisation
is the peril of the crowd. The power of the crowd that committed the
greatest crime in the history of the world lay in the fact that it was
perfectly organised. It was there in that chilly morning with only one
purpose, to cry, 'Crucify, Crucify.' Across all the mists of the
centuries we can see the organisers at work moving among the crowd.
They whisper to one group: 'He struck you in your property, overturning
the tables of your barter; if he lives you are ruined'; and to the
other: 'Remember his blasphemies: what he called himself.' ... And in
the trail of the organisers arose with intenser volume the cry,
'Crucify, Crucify.' It was the organised crowd that nailed the Son of
Man to the cross.

The fact that confronts us to-day is that the crowd is at last
perfectly organised; so perfectly organised that all the industry and
transport of three kingdoms can be stopped by the flash of an electric
wire. The crowd knows what it wants, and it has organised itself to
get it. But the crowd to-day is not an isolated handful such as that
of old in Athens or Jerusalem. The crowd is now world-wide and
international. What is shouted on the banks of the Volga in the
morning, at noon is shouted on the Clyde, and at the setting of the sun
in New York. For the cable and the telephone and the wireless have
woven humanity into one web. From the rising to the setting of the
sun, slowly but steadily on the forge the international crowd is being
hammered into the unity of steel.

In the old days the crowd had to storm their way into the presence