they would not live
to old age.

Other and less dreadful types of politicians without privacy come into
one's mind, the orator who night after night repeats the theatrical
success of his own personality, and, like the actor, keeps his recurring
fits of weary disgust to himself; the busy organising talkative man to
whom it is a mere delight to take the chair at four smoking concerts a
week. But there is no one of them who would not be the better, both in
health and working power, if he were compelled to retire for six months
from the public view, and to produce something with his own hand and
brain, or even to sit alone in his own house and think.

These facts, in so far as they represent the nervous disturbance
produced by certain conditions of life in political communities, are
again closely connected with the one point in the special psychology of
politics which has as yet received any extensive consideration--the
so-called 'Psychology of the Crowd,' on which the late M. Tarde, M. Le
Bon, and others have written. In the case of human beings, as in the
case of many other social and semi-social animals, the simpler
impulses--especially those of fear and anger--when they are consciously
shared by many physically associated individuals, may become enormously
exalted, and may give rise to violent nervous disturbances. One may
suppose that this fact, like the existence of laughter, was originally
an accidental and undesirable result of the mechanism of nervous
reaction, and that it persisted because when a common danger was
realised (a forest fire, for instance, or an attack by beasts of prey),
a general stampede, although it might be fatal to the weaker members of
the herd, was the best chance of safety for the majority.

My own observation of English politics suggests that in a modern
national state, this panic effect of the combination of nervous
excitement with physical contact is not of great importance. London in
the twentieth century is very unlike Paris in the eighteenth century, or
Florence in the fourteenth, if only because it is very difficult for any
considerable proportion of the citizens to be gathered under
circumstances likely to produce the special 'Psychology of the Crowd.' I
have watched two hundred thousand men assembled in Hyde Park for a
Labour Demonstration. The scattered platforms, the fresh air, the wide
grassy space, seemed to be an unsuitable environment for the production
of purely instinctiv