THE CHARM OF CROWDS.
THE last Bank Holiday, according to the Times, has " broken the record." The people of London, who, as we constantly forget, are more numerous than the Scotch, the Swedes, the Belgians, the Danes, the Servians, or the Greeks, poured out on Whit-Monday in swarms beyond all precedent, precipitating on their favourite resorts masses of humanity equal to the population of many great cities. A hundred thousand persons—twice the population of York—visited Kew Gardens ; sixty thousand passed the turnstiles of the Zoological Gardens ; seventy thousand spread themselves over Hampstead Heath ; and a single railway, the Great Eastern, carried a hundred and thirty-five thousand passengers out of town. It was a positive stampede; yet, though the rash at a few points was appalling, and the railway employes were worn out with fatigue, excitement, and continuous noise, there were scarcely any accidents, and no appearance either of rioting or of the smallest desire to riot. The people were excep- tionally sober, the cases of disorderliness brought before the Magistrates being fewer than on any previous year ; all delays, discomforts, and crushings were met with good- humour ; and in the North of London, as we know, and in the East, as we are told, there was a marked decline in that roughness of speech and demeanour which the more refined classes used to dread at least as much as violence. The very swearing has grown milder, and is getting freed, we wish we could quite understand why, from its deep old taint of blasphemy. Much of the extra numbers, and much, too, of the good temper, must, of course, be set down to the weather, which was continuously fine without being hot, and something to the general prosperity and feeling of elation among wage-earners ; but there was another cause besides. It can hardly be doubted, we think, that the popularity of these great holidays increases steadily, that the business of the Metropolis has adjusted itself to them, and that they have become, like Christmas Day, part of the regular and arranged-for lives of the immense majority. We doubt if they could be taken away again, even by Parliament; and certainly there is no sign, even the smallest, of any popular protest against their continuance, or of any desire that they should be split up—as we ourselves once recom- mended—so as to render the crowds less vast, or the march of the streams of pleasure-seekers less overwhelming. There has never been even a bole-and-corner meeting to denounce St. Lubbock's Days. How the multitudes are amused, how they are fed, how their drouth is appeased, are problems before which the imaginations of officers in the German Etappen might recoil; but of the broad fact there is no question what- ever. The millions of London like these holidays, and like them in part because of that very incident of multi- tudinous swarming which, to so many even of their most friendly critics, seems certain to spoil their pleasure. The vastness of the concourse delights instead of displeasing them. That seems strange to all men who have in them anything of the recluse temperament—and few of the literary class are entirely without a trace of it, though it may be kept down by habit—and we have ourselves often urged its strangeness ; but we are not sure, as experience increases, whether it is not a human instinct. The majority everywhere in all countries enjoy a crowd, and this even in climates where vast congregations of men involve an almost insufferable increase of heat, which they feel and at ordinary times resent even more than hyperboreans do. No one enjoys coolness like an Italian or an Asiatic of the South, and no one is so happy when multitudes press together. Indeed, we do not know why we say the majority enjoy crowds. The minority like a crush too, become more alive if the ball-room is so full that dancing is scarcely possible ; and if the theatre can hold no more, or the church is overflowing, feel, together with the sense of strain, a sense of a new fillip to their eagerness and their attention. The truth is, we imagine, that there is in a crowd, or rather in some " electric " influence which emanates from it, a source of excitement which all men feel—just reflect what a panic is when it seizes thousands—but which, to those whose usual lives are full of a grey monotony, is almost essential to high enjoyment. They want to be aware of each other. They are elated by the presence of a vast concourse, even under cir- cumstances when it seems to the few as if it must be a distress. Nothing can be more certain than that of the half- million Londoners who on a bright Bank Holiday fling them- selves out of London, and who mind the horrible discomfort of the journey out and back as little as great ladies mind the fatiguing drive before a Drawing-Room, a perceptible propor- tion, increasing every year, are true Nature-lovers, men and women who consciously exult in the fresh air, the unsmoked sky, the grass, and the trees, and the water; and they at least, one would think, must pine for a little solitude. How can they enjoy Nature without silence and tranquillity P They do, however. There are recluses among them, of course, whose efforts to be alone we may some day describe —numbers of them get up the trees and stop there— but we write on evidence when we say that the majority of the Nature-lovers would be chilled by even com- parative loneliness ; that they can and do enjoy the forest, for example, all the more for, as one buxom tree-worshipper expressed it, " the liveliness and the lots of folk." We are told by witnesses familiar with the very interesting organisations which are now getting, so to speak, linked into these holidays—there are great clubs of humble workers, dustmen, for example, which now arrange for these outings weeks beforehand, and are creating by their demands new and most curious trades—that this feeling is distinctly admitted, and that by men who would not miss the forest, or the water, or the flowers, or whatever their fancy is, " not for a week's pay down." Even these are gregarious in their very souls, while to the majority, who, if they thirst for Nature, do it unconsciously, an outing without crowds would be like a picnic without guests. They enjoy the life, the movement, the variety of the people, the sudden shiftings, the little tumults, the sense borne in on them from every side that there are thousands doing what they do, and seeking what they seek. They would be dull on Dartmoor ; they are half-intoxicated with gaiety on Hampstead Heath. The crowd itself, the drawback to the festival, is to them one of its principal charms, the feature which turns a heath, or a meadow, or a forest into an open-air theatre, where a new drama, and one they can understand, is enacted every moment for their amusement. We all know what Charles Lamb thought of the joys of the street. Well, an outing taken in crowds is to Londoners as a street in a paradise, with all pleasant things to see, with no dullness or sense of ennui, and with none of that vague alarm which every solitary place inspires in the true child of cities. "I couldn't abear the silence; I got frightened," said the London housemaid, explaining why she had thrown up a country place. The gutter-child rolls in ecstasy on the grass, bat lifts his head every few minutes to reassure himself by the sight of other human beings, as certainly as a poor swimmer lifts his to make sure of his distance from the shore.
If this is so, and the evidence accumulates every year, the notion of splitting these holidays must be abandoned ; and we doubt if there is much sense in the other notion which is, we see, being ventilated, of reducing the crowds to more order. The Railway Companies might perhaps increase the number of their supplemental termini, and might certainly sell tickets more widely on the days just before the holidays ; but the traffic managers are wise in leaving the people to manage for themselves as they best can. The excursionists seem very impatient, and the crushes are sometimes appalling; but the national habit of fending for itself is not to be altered for a holiday. As a matter of fact, the excursionists do not kill each other, or hart each other, or make any general effort to cheat the Companies. Even the children are not crushed, though their escapes so often seem miraculous; nor, which is still more wonderful, are they lost in anything like the numbers one might reasonably expect. Friends look after them somehow, and a child handed over a few yards of struggling humanity drops into its father's arms at last, screaming, perhaps, but uncrushed, and with its clothes -antorn. It is very doubtful if any new arrangement by division into pens, or any multiplication of railway officials, would do any good at all. The people themselves keep order of a sort, and have a way of melting into the carriages which is quite as useful as any habit of standing in queue. They will not learn that, whatever is said ; and it is much safer to accept the national ways, and if possible utilise them, as, for example, the regular street way of dividing passengers into currents might be utilised, than to risk misapprehension by new devices. If in any way the excursionists could be taught to walk fast instead of running, the work of filling a train would be much facilitated ; but -there is only one improvement that is urgently required. There ought to be some signal, whistle, or shriek, or drum- roll, understood by everybody to mean, " Silence on the plat- form !" An order or an instruction could then be heard and obeyed even by the bewildered, and it is the few bewildered who on excursion-days create the whole of the danger, which even as it is, if we may trust the evidence of nine years, is habitually exaggerated. There are more people killed by carts in London in a month, than are killed by excursion crowds in a dozen
years. They are horrid crowds, no doubt ; but those who join them like them, and are safe in them, and the fastidious have almost always the option of staying away.
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