PANICS.
ACURIOUS story comes from Italy of a panic which lately seized upon a portion of the population of Naples. Oar readers may remember how in cholera years rumours have suddenly got abroad in Italy that the disease was the work of poisoners, and how the doctors and all those trying to help the sick have been looked on with suspicion, and have even been hunted for their lives as the authors of the plague. In the present case, however, the fear has not been of disease, or of the malicious spreading of contagion. The panic which during the past few weeks has taken hold of Naples has been of a still more extraordinary kind, for it has not had anything half so natural or so definite as the spread of a mysterious and well-nigh incurable dis- ease to support it. " They are carrying off the children,"—
that has been the cry of horror and dismay that has run like wildfire among the poorer and more ignorant quarters of the
great crowded Mediterranean city. Whence or how arose
the dread—no less real and terrible because it was groundless —has not been discovered, and probably never will be ; for the unhappy Neapolitan parents do not ever seem to have thought of asking where the story came from. All they knew, and all they cared to know, was that every one said that
kidnappers of children were abroad, and that they must look to their little ones if they wanted to save them. Mothers, we are told, shut up their children in the houses, and the doors of the schools were beset with crowds of weeping women in an agony of terror lest their children should have been stolen from them. In spite of all that the Press and the authorities could say to the contrary, the belief in the kidnapping was entertained by thousands. Yet, as in most such cases, there appears to have been nothing what- ever to account for the panic of the distracted parents. In a great city, as in a great army, there are, of course, always a certain number of persons who disappear unaccounted for ; but there seems to have been no increase of casualties of this sort in Naples in August, 1888, sufficient to account for the sadden frenzy which seized upon the population.
It is curious to examine the nature of the panics founded upon delusions to which great bodies of ignorant and excitable men and women are liable. In their nature they seem at first sight to differ very greatly from those personal panics and indi- vidual fears which belong to men singly. There is hardly a man, we suppose, who does not cherish somewhere in his secret soul something in the nature of a panic-deluzion,—some ground- less terror to the incursions of which he is every now and then liable. One man believes that some special food, or some particular kind of tobacco or brand of wine, is deadly not only to him, but to the world at large. Such delusions in the individual are common enough both among the educated and uneducated classes, though with the uneducated they take more fantastic forms. As long, however, as it remains individual, the microbe of delusion is harmless enough. The man who cherishes it is all the time half-aware of the ground- lessness of his private panic, and almost always keeps his semi- belief in it a profound secret,—indeed, never allows it to be discovered except by some accident. The delusion is well in hand, and is never acted upon except in some shamefaced secret ritual. Occasionally, however, and almost exclusively among poor, ignorant people, the panic-delusion microbe, so innocent when it exists in the single individual, is simul- taneously and spontaneously generated among a number of persons. Then the disease produced by the microbe becomes, by some process of reciprocal infection, changed not only in degree but in kind. It becomes not merely a quintessence of the private delusions, but a new and horrible form of panic. In the individual, it was mild, latent, hall-hearted, easily given up or destroyed, and well under control. In the public, it becomes fierce, active, heart-and-brain absorbing, ineradicable, and uncontrollable. When once the frenzy of a panic, based on a delusion no matter how absurd, has seized upon a. multitude of men and women, they entirely cease to be able to control tt ; and while the fit is on, it is useless to attempt to argue them out of their apprehensions,—the delusion which when held by one man is impotent even over him, may so affect a crowd that in each one of them, individually as well as collectively, it becomes the ruling passion. In Asia, and particularly in India, where men lie thick together, and where the shuddering mysteries of a religion weird, cruel, and fantastic, in its grosser forms, hold complete sovereignty over the mind, such panics and delusions are not only common, but assume the most extraordinary forms. Not much more than ten years ago, the inhabitants of Calcutta and the country round. were thrown into a convulsion of dismay by the rumour that the Government required the bodies of a thousand children with which to lay the foundations of the piers for a great bridge over the Hooghly, and were going to seize the boys and girls of the people. The Bengalees had never seen the English do such things ; they had never, we may suppose, heard it rumoured that it was their custom ; and yet suddenly this great horror arose among them, and could only be appeased when they found that in reality no such sacrifice took place. Strangely enough, the notion that if a bridge is to stand, a human sacrifice is required at its foundation, is worldwide. There is, we believe, hardly a nation that does not possess in some shape or other the pathetic legend of the child built up in the pier, who, as the walls rise, calls to its mother,—" Mother, I can see thee ;" " Mother, I can only see thee a little ;" " Mother, I cannot see thee at all." Indeed, the belief that men are sometimes built up in bridges has even been known in modern England, though the folk-lore that tells how the demons demand the sacrifice of a human life in the building has utterly died out. Unless the present writer is under a delusion as great as any he has attempted to touch on, the earlier volumes of the Illustrated London News contain an account of a most curious circumstance which took place with regard to Lord Leigh's park near Coventry. A bridge was being built over a stream or a piece of a lake in the park, and the rumour somehow spread to the neighbouring town that before the great heavy coping-stone of one of the piers was put on, a mason had been deooyed into the hollow, and that then the flat stone had been let down upon him. So firmly was the report credited, and so widely did it spread, that a mob collected in Coventry, proceeded to the park, and would not be satisfied till the stone had been removed and the delusion thus dispelled. That, however, was forty years ago, and Board schools have perhaps put beyond the range of possibility the chance of such an occurrence taking place again. Still, the fact remains that not only, in some curious, dumb, instinctive way did the legend that a human being must be buried alive in a new bridge linger on, but that it could suddenly and without warning—a number of other bridges must have been built that same year near Coventry—cause a panic.-delusion of the strongest kind. Perhaps, however, we are wrong, after all, in saying that the panic-delusions of crowds belong exclusively to the poor and ignorant classes. Commercial panics have often been started and maintained by the most groundless fears and fancies. Again, the sanitary or the medical panics of society are often founded upon something very like delusions. Some one writes to the Times and says that Egyptian cigarettes con- tain certain deadly poisons, and immediately half the cigarette-smokers in the country grow uneasy, and for the next week smoke nothing but pipes and cigars. No doubt the panics of the rich are somewhat under con- trol, and require some slight appearance of a foundation. In reality, however, they are nothing but the fad of an individual, which, harmless and inactive in him, has for some unknown reason become suddenly and simultaneously active and epidemic in a number of people. The day may come when such a thing as a panic founded on a delusion will be an impossibility ; but that day is still very far off. When it does come, and when even the private delusions, the individual fads, have gone, shall we in reality be any better off ? It was a wise man who said,—" What would life be without its prejudices ?" A very dull place, we expect, for reason and entertainment do not always march hand-in-hand.
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