In most cases the crowd naturally is under leaders, who, with an instinctive consciousness of the importance and strength of the crowd, seek to direct it much more through the power of suggestion than by sound conviction.
It is conceivable, therefore, that anyone who understands how to arrest the attention of the crowd, may always influence it to do great deeds, as history, indeed, sufficiently witnesses. One may recall from the history of Russia Minin, who with a slogan saved his native land from the gravest danger. His "Pawn your wife and child, and free your fatherland" necessarily acted as a powerful suggestion on the already intense crowd. How the crowd and its sentiments may be controlled is indicated in the following account by Boris Sidis:
On the 11th of August, 1895, there took place in the open air a meeting at Old Orchard, Maine. The business at hand was a collection for missionary purposes. The preacher resorted to the following suggestions: "The most remarkable remembrance which I have of foreign lands is that of multitudes, the waves of lost humanity who ceaselessly are shattered on the shores of eternity. How despairing are they, how poor in love—their religion knows no joy, no pleasure, nor song. Once I heard a Chinaman say why he was a Christian. It seemed to him that he lay in a deep abyss, out of which he could not escape. Have you ever wept for the sake of the lost world, as did Jesus Christ? If not, then woe to you. Your religion is then only a dream and a blind. We see Christ test his disciples. Will he take them with him? My beloved, today he will test you. [Indirect suggestion.] He could convert a thousand millionaires, but he gives you an opportunity to be saved. [More direct suggestion.] Are you strong enough in faith? [Here follows a discussion about questions of faith.] Without faith God can do no great things. I believe that Jesus will appear to them who believe firmly in him. My dear ones, if only you give for the sake of God, you have become participants in the faith. [Still more direct suggestion.] The youth with the five loaves and the two little fishes [the story follows]. When everything was ended, he did not lose his loaves; there were twelve baskets left over. O my dear ones, how will that return! Sometime the King of Kings will call to you and give you an empire of glory, and simply because you have had a little faith in him. It is a day of much import to you. Sometime God will show us how much better he has guarded our treasure than we ourselves." The suggestion had the desired effect. Money streamed from all sides; hundreds became thousands, tens of thousands. The crowd gave seventy thousand dollars.
Of analogous importance are the factors of suggestions in wars, where the armies go to brilliant victories. Discipline and the sense of duty unite the troops into a single mighty giant's body. To develop its full strength, however, this body needs some inspiration through a suggested idea, which finds an active echo in the hearts of the soldiers. Maintenance of the warlike spirit in decisive moments is one of the most important problems for the ingenious general.
Even when the last ray of hope for victory seems to have disappeared, the call of an honored war chief, like a suggestive spark, may fire the hosts to self-sacrifice and heroism. A trumpet signal, a cry "hurrah," the melody of the national hymn, can here at the decisive moment have incalculable effects. There is no need to recall the rôle of the "Marsellaise" in the days of the French Revolution. The agencies of suggestion in such cases make possible, provided that they are only able to remove the feeling of hopelessness, results which a moment before are neither to be anticipated nor expected. Where will and the sense of duty alone seem powerless, the mechanisms of suggestion may develop surprising effects.
Excited masses are, it is well known, capable of the most inhuman behavior, and indeed for the very reason that, instead of sound logic, automatism and impulsiveness have entered in as direct results of suggestion. The modern barbarities of the Americans in the shape of lynch law for criminals or those who are only under a suspicion of a crime redound to the shame of the land of freedom, but find their full explanation in that impulsiveness of the crowd which knows no mercy.
The multitude can, therefore, ever be led according to the content of the ideas suggested to it, as well to sublime and noble deeds as, on the other hand, to expressions of the lower and barbaric instincts. That is the art of manipulating the masses.
It is a mistake to regard popular assemblies who have adopted a certain uniform idea simply as a sum of single elements, as is now and then attempted. For one is dealing in such cases, not with accidental, but with actual psychical, processes of fusion, which reciprocal suggestion is to a high degree effective in establishing and maintaining. The aggressiveness of the single elements of the mass arrives in this at their high point at one and the same time, and with complete spiritual unanimity the mass can now act as one man; it moves, then, like one enormous social body, which unites in itself the thoughts and feelings of all by the very fact that there is a temper of mind common to all. Easily, however, as the crowd is to excite to the highest degrees of activity, as quickly—indeed, much more quickly—does it allow itself, as we have already seen, to be dispersed by a panic. Here too the panic rests entirely on suggestion, contra-suggestion, and the instinct of imitation, not on logic and conviction. Automatism, not intelligence, is the moving factor therein.
Other, but quite generally favorable, conditions for suggestions are universally at hand in the human society, whose individual members in contrast to the crowd are physically separated from each other but stand in a spiritual alliance to each other. Here obviously those preliminary conditions for the dissemination of psychical infections are lacking as they exist in the crowd, and the instruments of the voice, of mimicry, of gestures, which often fire the passions with lightning rapidity, are not allowed to assert themselves. There exists much rather a certain spiritual cohesion on the ground perhaps of common impressions (theatrical representations), a similar direction of thoughts (articles in periodicals, etc.). These conditions are quite sufficient to prepare the foundation on which similar feelings propagate themselves from individual to individual by the method of suggestion and auto-suggestion, and similar decisions for many are matured.
Things occur here more slowly, more peacefully, without those passionate outbreaks to which the crowd is subjected; but this slow infection establishes itself all the more surely in the feelings, while the infection of the crowd often only continues for a time until the latter is broken up.