It will be observed that in the following pages political and economic events are presented in their aspect of emotion-producing forces in social pressure, with but scant attention to their other values. An artificially selective process must also be acknowledged in that, of those events only such as seem to have produced a direct emotional reaction upon a people have been considered. Those long continued economic movements which produced no sudden changes have not been taken into account, because what may be termed their disturbing effects were too gradual to allow of their being included among specific emotion-making forces[1]; slow changes are not sensed by whole peoples. Uneducated masses, especially, do not become conscious of progressive movements until their effects are so apparent as to require consideration by reason of aroused emotional reaction. The history of a slow transition, therefore, may be for the scientific purposes of this investigation unimportant as compared with the somewhat dislocated perturbance, which resulted at the moment when the events under consideration were happening, and calling forth a reaction definitely emotional. Moreover, at such a precise moment, the events may have been raised to social consciousness, not as they appear to us in the clear afterlight of scientific attitude and historical accuracy, but as popular concepts of the moment, having power to arouse intense national emotional reaction; similar recent popular waves of feeling, due not to facts as they are, but to popular conceptions of such facts, will readily occur to each reader.
With this warning that not the dignity of history, but the intensity of public emotionalism is within the purview and area of our investigation, we may proceed to a statement of the method and of the general thesis.
The method to be pursued, is to examine contemporaneous and concurrent public events and emotion products, as expressed in Music.
The results indicated may be given a preliminary statement as follows:
1. Agitation is a cause of pulse disturbance.
2. Sufficient agitation produces fatal disturbance of bodily rhythm.
3. All strong emotions are disturbers of rhythmic motion throughout the body.
4. Rhythmic motion, too often disturbed, leads to abnormal mental and physical conditions.
5. Civilization constantly “disturbs” the bodily rhythm.
6. The political and industrial troubles of a nation are signs of national “disturbance” of rhythm.