Victory out of Ruin

by Norman Maclean

Great Britain led the world in the deliverance of humanity from the degradation of slavery; the United States and Canada are leading the world in the still greater deliverance of humanity from the degradation of alcohol. Out of the West cometh the world's salvation. America, that is for ever singing of itself as the 'sweet land of liberty,' is now the seat of the greatest experiment in personal coercion that the world has known. And that is because the American has freed his mind from cant. He has replaced the conception of liberty as liberty to do as we like by the conception of liberty which is the liberation of large masses of the community from thraldom to their base appetites and from the oppression of grafters and profiteers. The main cause of that deliverance was the awakened conscience of the people. When the power to veto licences was placed in the hands of the people, the citizens became conscious of the fact that when they voted for a licence they were just as much partners in the saloon as if they furnished the liquor and sold it standing behind the bar. When they considered that the poisoning of the poor by alcohol was a road to wealth, when they traced the misery and ruin that afflicted the community to the saloons, they felt that they could not any longer be sharers in the traffic nor incur responsibility for it. It was the Churches of the land that wakened the conscience of the people. It was better that any community perish rather than that they should offend one of the little ones for which Christ died.... What we need is that the conscience of the community should be wakened in the same manner. The Church of Christ alone can sound the trumpet that wakens from the slumber of torpor. But the Church seems more concerned about dealing out soothing syrup to its soporific members than about wakening the dead. The spectacle of bishops denouncing Prohibition in the name of Freedom; of representative Church Councils refusing to recommend the cause of No-Licence; of congregations being narcotised to the slaughter of the innocents that goes on ceaselessly all around them—the victims of Bacchus laid for ever on his altar—while the preacher proclaims peace, peace, where there is no peace, and expounds an evangel of sweetness and light while the people are perishing—all that may well make angels weep. But the Churches are wakening. The founder of Christianity prayed, 'Lead us not into temptation,' and Christians cannot for ever acquiesce in the State tempting its own children to their destruction. Just as we look back and marvel how any Christian could ever defend slavery, so fifty years hence, when the liquor traffic will have become a memory, men will marvel how Christians could ever have defended the Liquor Trade and looked on, silent, while it swept the young and the strong to doom.

CHAPTER VI

THE PERIL OF THE CROWD

The history of humanity is in large measure the history of its own illusions. It has always been towards the mirage that men have tramped with bleeding feet, only to strew the desert with bleached bones. One great illusion has been that the golden age would come when the world's autocracies gave place at last to democracy, and the will of the multitude became law. It has come; democracy now wields the world's sceptre. But alas! the golden age tarries, and the wistful doubt arises whether the greatest peril confronting humanity may not be just that—the sceptre in the hand of the unregenerate crowd.

I

For what we have to remember is that the crowd is by its very nature and spirit capable of crimes such as the individual autocrat would shrink from in horror. You may think that fantastic, and imagine that a crowd consists, after all, of so many individuals, and that the spirit of the crowd can only be the aggregate of the individuals comprising it. But such a view is mistaken. The corporate spirit of the crowd is not that of the units composing it. The best illustration of this is the sudden reeling back into the jungle of a crowd when a panic seizes them. Let the cry 'Fire' be raised in a crowded building, and though the separate individuals be of the gentlest and most considerate, yet instantly the crowd becomes dæmonic, a wrestling, writhing, struggling mass trampling the weak under foot, with no thought but self-preservation.

There are various explanations. One is the law of sympathy, by which an emotion is intensified in being shared. At the first cry of peril a wave of fear passes through the crowd; and as each looks at the faces around him he sees fear in every eye. The emotion suddenly unloosed is like a river whose source is amid the silent hills, that gathers in its course a thousand rills, until at last it sweeps in mighty floods everything before it. Before the flood of terror generated by the crowd all the decencies of civilisation vanish, and man becomes once more the animal with but the one instinct—to fight for one's life. And it is the same with anger. Let a skilled orator set himself to rouse the passion of a crowd, and he will soon generate a spirit that utterly obliterates the individual. Let him depict the wrongs they suffer, and anger sweeps through the multitude, bending them to the spirit of the orator as the corn field bends before the wind. Though as individuals they may tremble in their shoes before their wives, now, fused by rhetoric into one glowing mass, they are ready to loot a city, pull down a Bastille, and level an absolutist throne with the dust. But the great explanation of the spirit of the crowd as distinct from the individual is that in the surge of contagious emotion generated by the crowd the sense of personal identity is lost. Each only lives in the crowd. And with the loss of identity comes the loss of personal responsibility. I no longer stand alone to be judged for my acts; it is the crowd who will be judged. The brake of personal responsibility suddenly snaps. It is thus that a crowd will commit a crime that the individual afterwards remembers with horror. Only a crowd could have said: 'His blood be on us and on our children.'

In these last years the horrors that struck a chill into the heart of the world were committed by the crowd. Suddenly in a Belgian village the cry was raised, 'We are being sniped.' Instantly the soldiers were swept by one emotion, and there rose the cry for vengeance. Then the Mayor and the priest and a handful of village notables would be gathered and shot. It was the rage and panic of a crowd seeking its own safety through brutality.

It is plain, then, that the spirit of the crowd is something far other than that of the individual, and is capable of the greatest crimes. It was the crowd that compelled Socrates to drink the hemlock; it was the crowd that overbore that poor vacillating weakling, Pilate, with their monotonous chant, 'Crucify, Crucify'; it has always been the crowd that has turned the sanctuaries into the nesting-places of owls and bats; and the rock on which humanity may make shipwreck at last is just this—the crowd. The millions of the dead have made the world safe for democracy: the appalling question now is—Who will make democracy safe for the world?