13 FEBRUARY 1886, Page 10

THE FEAR OF MOBS.

IT is a little difficult to explain either the meaning of the word " Mob," or the horror with which the thing is now regarded in all countries of Europe by the educated. Properly speaking, " Mob " is only a slang word—a corruption origin- ally from mobile vulgus—for a great assemblage of persons not under official control or guidance, and such an assem- blage need not be either contemptible or terrible. It may be quite good-humoured and full of respect. We remember seeing the two greatest mobs ever collected in Europe—the one which welcomed Princess Alexandra of Denmark as " the bride of the Heir of the Kings of the Sea," and the one which in April, 1864, received Garibaldi—and in neither was there anything terrible, except, perhaps, the vastness of a crowd which, it is believed, surpassed all human precedent. Everybody was good- humoured, everybody was obedient, and the totality was a sea in its moments of most picturesque yet suggestive charm. It was not a Mediterranean ; you felt that there was a tide in it and the possibility of a roar, and it moved occasionally as if it would engulf all things ; but it slept, nevertheless, down to its depths. It was terrible to think what a rush of that crowd would mean, but it never rushed. The word, however, as now used, does not mean an assemblage only, but an assemblage in movement, stirred by an emotion, and either aimless, or directing itself to some unlawful end ; and the horror felt of such an assemblage, though probably exag- gerated by the influence of vague tradition, does not need history to justify it. History does justify it, for there is hardly an instance to be recalled of a mob bent on good —the thing has occurred, we believe, but no one remembers the cases—but history is not entirely responsible for the feeling. There are other causes. In the first place, a fluid mob is irre- sistible till opposed to its only real antagonist, a mob organised, and the individual dreads that against which he can do nothing. He is more powerless than the swimmer against the sea, and is conscious of the fact, with an underlying idea, which he has not about the sea, that he ought to have some power. He is one, and the mob is many, but it is only many ones ; and in the one the hopelessness of struggle rouses irritation as well as fear. He

is not resisting a natural force, but a sentient force, which calls on him, as the storm or the earthquake does not, for resistance as well as fortitude. Sometimes the individual resists the mob, and then you will always find that he fights with a deadly fury which no other antagonist can arouse, and which he would be ashamed of if assailed by a natural force, though swimmers say they have felt rage against the ocean, which, in drowning them, whips them in the face with a cruelty that reads to its victim like active scorn. Irresistibleness in anything arouses terror, and especially if it is accompanied with the sense of surprise. You do not dread the sea or a discharge of musketry as you dread the earthquake, which upsets all calculation, rouses the sense of surprise in its highest form, and makes man feel as if his first instinctive dependence, the regularity of the order of Nature, had come to an end. No habitude ever inures men to earth- quakes. It is not quite rational, but somehow, in Europe at least, the dependence on social order has come to be instinctive ; and a break in it, such as a mob movement either indicates or causes citizens to expect, startles like an earthquake, an effect increased by the fact that it does not come from above. A mob dangerous enough to be recorded is usually a mob attacking superiors, not inferiors. If negroes were historians, there would be a remarkable exception to that role in the dangerous rise of the Irish mob of New York in 1866 upon the negroes, when the inferior race were murdered in heaps, and the true Americans had at last to turn out to pro- tect them ; but, as a rale, a mob-rising is always a rising from below. There ale, therefore, many elements of horror present,— irresistible force, hostility, and inferiority of caste ; the latter a fact which, if it increases contempt, increases also fear. There are, however, more than these. There are two marked facts about a mob which increase the horror it inspires, and of which, though one is intelligible, the other remains one of the most inexplicable phenomena of the human mind.

A mob is mentally blind, or insane from lack of a single con- trolling will ; and the dread of blind force or insane force is natural. The mind instinctively expects that that which opposes it, yet is sentient, shall be reasonable; shall in the last resort, when resistance is over, hear argument, or menace, or supplication. It unconsciously holds this to be certain, as in resisting troops, or a sane opponent, however furious ; and the sense that the reason is not there, that the very instruments of reason are wanting, cows it inexpressibly. Scarcely any man has the nerve to face a true maniac—a most unusual character, happily—and a mob in fury either is, or to its victim seems to be, a true maniac. It is acting under an impulse which is not reason, and to which reason is no counterpoise ; and to man, who uncon- sciously relies on his reason as his best defence, this is always terrible, and usually, unless he can in his turn apply terror to his enemy, irresistibly so. Ten resolute soldiers with rifles will face a crowd, because they know by experience that terror is on their side ; but a mob of a hundred men will not, as a rule, face a mob of a thousand. They will occasionally, when strengthened by the pride of caste or colour, or so united as not to be really a mob ; but merely as a mob they will not. That is easily understood; but whence comes the strange feeling that a mob will be specially wicked, more wicked than any one of its compound individuals, more thievish, more cruel, more murderous ? That idea, quite universal in Europe, and the first cause of the dread of mobs, is not born of terror only, but is more or less substantially true. A mob, as a rule, is worse than its components, is as bad at least as the worst of those components, and sometimes, so far as human eye can judge, is worse than the worst of them, committing acts, as during both the Red and the White Terror in France, from which individuals would shrink appalled. Why ? Why, that is, does not the general average in a mob raise the exceptional bad- ness in it to its own level, instead of the average sinking to the exceptional badness of the few P A crowd of decent persons with two thieves in it will plunder a shop ; a crowd of fairly humane men with a murderer in front will murder a man ; an " audience " broke loose will hiss with a scornful cruelty that no individual would show. It cannot be that the comparative exemption from consequences of itself is the sole cause,—or, in other words, that there is a devil in all of us which only needs to be let loose, and likes the letting. That is possibly true, unhappily, of all but a few, but it is not the whole troth. There is some mental relation in men when collected in numbers and wild with excitement, which makes them evil as it makes them cowards. The timidity of a crowd is proverbial, and constantly for a few moments rises to the height of mania, and this when the crowd consists of men individually brave. The stampedes of soldiers all individually ready to fight, when their discipline has been lost, are matters of history ; and we see every year men naturally brave who, daring an alarm of fire or other panic, exhibit the most abject cowardice. When the Ring Theatre in Vienna was burnt a few years since, scores of men rushed out in wild terror, crushing their friends and fellow- citizens, who, nevertheless, when they reached the open air, rushed back into the flames to help their children or kinefolk. Only two persons in that great crowd showed true courage,— one the courage of the intelligence, which discerned the patkef safety, and the other the courage of implicit confidence, and, therefore, of immediate and successful obedience. The impelse of a mob once excited is undoubtedly of that kind ; and be like cause what it may—it is probably a paralysis throngh excite- ment of the true will, which is the seat of virtue, because the instrument of self-restraint—a mob is undoubtedly usually worse than its own parts, often worse than any part within it. This has been so long observed, and is so well understood, that in Europe laws have been made by the hundred against the collection of mobs, and the police regulations•of all countries contain clauses directed against the mere group- ing of casual assemblages. We call them here only "obstruc- tions," but it is not as obstructions that they are dispersed. The central idea of all such laws is that men gathered in crowns, and uncontrolled either by leaders or by a visible motive, are apt to develop some evil quality ; and the idea, though pushed in many places to absurd lengths, has in it some truth, repeatedly and lamentably confirmed by human experience. A mob, if it is a true " mob "—that is, a collection of men naiad and unoon- trolled—is never quite safe, and requires always to be observed by those who can, if need be, restore it to an organised con- dition.

All that reads to us like sound sense based on the experience of humanity; and yet there is one very large and very puzzling excep- tion to it all. Mobs in Asia appear not to be dreaded, and ap- parently are not dreadful. Kings never dream of prohibitingtbeen, and the people are not in the least afraid of them. All over Asia, from Constantinople to Shanghai, vast mobs continually assemble for worship, for jollification, for curiosity, and nobody interferes. The Kings do not apprehend revolt from them, the polioodo not look for riot, the people do not fear accident. In India, Burmah, Ceylon, Arabia, China, immense crowds continually assemble without disturbance of any kind, without endangering

public peace, and without disaster, save when, owing to the oon- sequent breach of sanitary laws, some devastating epidemic is occasionally generated. A true " mob " of a hundred thousand persons is a constant phenomenon in India, and is as little ,re- garded by the Magistrates as a crowd of a thousand would be here. What is the cause of that difference, which must have lasted for ages P We are wholly unable to answer the question, except by stating two facts familiar to every one who has seen such gatherings. A crowd in Asia, though liable to panic, does not catch impulses from its own members, as a crowd does in Europe, remaining more of a collection of separate individuals-the true explanation of the inferiority of Asiatic armies—and never hates its own social system. It may rush at the foreigner, never at its own Magistrates or rich classes. The will of the individual Asiatic is, we fancy, too strong to be broken by the hysteric impulse which a crowd communicates ; but though that explanation may serve, it does but add one more to the half-intelligible differences which separate the white man from the remainder of humanity.