THE CONTROL OF CROWDS.
WE do not want to discuss the responsibility for the muddle of Saturday on the Horse Guards Parade, St. James's Park, but only the idea which must have been the cause of it. Nobody, we may take it as certain, wished to place the Princess of Wales in jeopardy of an accident, or to annoy the crowd of personages who had tickets for a non- existent enclosure, or to spoil a ceremonial which might have been attractive ; but all those results were secured by mis- management which obviously rested on an idea. Somebody had clearly got it into his head that the ordinary precautions were useless, that soldiers and police were out of place in a festive gathering of a good-humoured community, and that everything might be left to the sympathetic kindliness, or, as it is now the etiquette among Radicals to describe it, the " love " of the self-organising populace. The consequence was, that all arrangements went to pieces. There was no enclosure, for the mob broke into it. There was no parade of the fire-engines, which was the scenic object of the gathering, for if the horses had galloped as is their wont, the people would have been killed in dozens, and the panic which was just averted would have ended in a stampede and a catastrophe. Everybody of importance to the show was hustled, the members of the Royal family were surrounded and mobbed, the addresses could not be heard, and the speeches in reply could not be delivered. There was no great harm done, as it happened ; nobody was killed, and very few were even slightly injured; but a pretty ceremonial was turned into a scene of hopeless confusion, which everybody present felt might, by the slightest accident or burst of alarm, have been exaggerated into a serious catastrophe. Five minutes of panic, and a score of lives might have been sacrificed. The cause of a muddle thoroughly discreditable to its authors, whoever they were, was the belief that the danger or the innocuousness of a crowd depends entirely upon its temper; that if it is good- tempered and loyal, nothing is to be feared from it ; and that, consequently, unless hostility is suspected, it requires no sort of guidance or control. That is a blunder which, in an age when everybody is supposed to think scientifically, one would hardly have expected. A crowd, especially a London crowd, which is always of unexpectedly large proportions, is something more than a collection of individuals with tempers bad or good ; it is also a vast collection of heavy matter, always in motion, and when in motion moving like a fluid. The rash of twenty thousand persons at two miles an hour is equivalent to the projection of a rock weighing twelve hundred tons at that pace, and if it could be directed on as small a space, would sweep away anything—the Horse Guards, for instance, or the National Gallery—as certainly as an advancing column of lava or ice or water would. Fortunately, it is much dispersed,
and it possesses the power of stopping itself; but still, while it moves, and especially while it moves involuntarily, its impact is a terrible thing, will break through the most solid barriers like paper, will overthrow horses and carriages as if they had no foot- hold, and will crush human beings to death against anything solid enough to resist, as certainly as a hydraulic press or a steam-hammer would. To prevent such a crowd, when multi- plied fivefold, from making rushes, or even swaying violently, is, therefore, of the last importance, and experience proves that the only way to do it is to arouse the general willingness to stop—which is quite separate from individual willingness —by displaying visible barriers, if possible living barriers, which the crowd is unwilling to pass. You cannot stop the mass once in motion, but you can induce it on one con- dition to stop itself, the condition being that it shall recognise the necessity. That condition is, with our manners, only completely fulfilled when it sees a thin line of soldiers or a thick line of police,—that is, when the mass per- ceives that by advancing further it will encounter physical resistance, and break the law, and violate social rules it quite understands and approves, all at once. The mere presence of danger is no check at all. If a huge crowd, for example, were on the Embankment, and there were no railings, and a rush or sway occurred, one-third of the crowd would in ten minutes be struggling for its life in the Thames, and the remainder would be half-mad with fear and fury. The cater line of unknown men which would instinctively push shoreward would be no protection at all, would be swept away by the weight of the mass as if it had no existence ; but a line of the Guards along the edge would, nevertheless, pro- bably prevent disaster, certainly prevent it unlesti there positively was not room for the mass to keep streaming on, the reason being that the soldiers would have the help of the crowd's own volition. The mass of moving weight would try to keep inside. It is to arouse that volition that Guards, barriers, flags, and other visible things are neces- sary in the management of crowds, however good-tempered and however indisposed to disorder, and for no other reason. The notion that the presence of soldiers or police in a London gathering shows distrust of the crowd, is pure absurdity. Nobody distrusts drinking-water, but everybody confines it in vessels. The crowd can no more keep order of itself than a torrent can, and until its general intelligence—which differs entirely from the intelligence of its component parts—is awakened, it is not master of its own movements, but sways hither and thither with the automatic impulse and deadly effect of Victor Hugo's gun-carriage when it broke loose at sea. Considerations of temper, education, class, or motive have nothing to do with the matter, one of the most un- manageable crowds in the world for its size, which is com- paratively very small, being the crowd which advances at intervals during the year to be presented to the Queen. If that crowd, in which no human being means any mischief whatever, were multiplied by twenty, nothing but soldiers, and plenty of them too, could prevent an occasional cata- strophe, such as we have all seen occur when a theatre or a public hall disgorges itself too rapidly. A great crowd, a crowd weighing hundreds of tons, is never safe, even if it be composed of Quakers or of nuns, unless its weight is broken, and its pace assured by barriers which compel it to exert its own power of halting or moving slowly. No barrier, moreover, is so effectual as a line of uniformed men, because no other can be so easily put in the right place, and no other, owing to ages of custom, excites such willingness to cease movement. Such a line has precisely the same moral effect as the red thread which stops a Japanese crowd in its fiercest swayings, and arrests a rush, it is said, as suddenly as a wall of rock masonry would. There was a time when to break the thread meant death there and then, and the tradition compels the Japanese mob to exert its own power of stopping within the line.
We have assumed for the moment the contention of the theorists that a "crowd," being a section of "the People," is always good-humoured and always well-intentioned; but the assumption is only a courteous form, imposed by the present habit of flattering any large body of men. A crowd is never well-conditioned when it is in a fright, and an English crowd is seldom well-conditioned when it is wild with curiosity to see Royal people. A pure accident, like the fall of a tile, or the bolting of a pair of horses, or the scream of
a frightened woman, will create an alarm which, if it happens to spread, will develope into a wild stampede, a rash at the highest pace, which while it lasts would, but for the space it covers, be, we repeat, exactly as dangerous as that of a rock of the same weight and travelling with the same velocity. We have all seen or read of such alarms within buildings, and if for any reason the crowd is compressed, they are just as dangerous in the open air. And, unhappily, in a capital city, though the immense majority are well- disposed, a minority have an interest in creating such an alarm. The criminal class, the vicious section of the roughs, and those who love disorder as a source of amusement, all want confusion, and unless restrained by the presence of movable force, they can always create it. Ten men rushing in concert, with or without join- ing hands, can set ten thousand in movement, and produce the panic under which a crowd has neither good intentions nor bad intentions, nothing but furious Ifear, or rather, for fear misdescribes it, a furious desire to keep on rushing somewhither. When Royalty is present, or anything which excites curiosity, a mere howl of welcome, followed by a small rush to see the arrivals, will set the whole mass in move- ment in one direction, and produce a surge of the human wave which is alike irresistible and dangerous, which will, if continued, overwhelm any possible resistance, and which can be stopped only by a feeling operating within the mind of the mass itself. To say that none are willing to cause such rushes, is to deny the plainest facts, and to assert not only that Londoners are good—which is true to a degree of which it is true about 110 other population—but that they are all good, an assertion contradicted every day in every police-court. The class which intends mischief is small enough, not 1 per cent. of the people, as Mr. Booth has shown ; but on gala days it is reinforced by 1 per cent, more of furious fools, and the two together can, whenever they like, convert any unregulated crowd of twenty thousand persons who happen to have a common object of curiosity, into a dangerous rushing stream. That, not distrust of the people, is the justification for con- trol, which, again, can only be exerted easily by men whose "ordered line" the people are unwilling to break. With their aid, a ceremonial is possible ; without them, "the People," among other annoyances, misses the very pageant it came out to see.
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