The mob is thus a formation that takes time. In an audience falling under the spell of an actor or an orator, a congregation developing the revival spirit, a crowd becoming riotous, or an army under the influence of panic, we can witness the stages by which the mob mood is reached. With the growing fascination of the mass for the individual, his consciousness contracts to the pin point of the immediate moment, and the volume of suggestion needed to start an impulse on its conquering career becomes less and less. In the end, perhaps, any commanding person can assume the direction of the mob.
It must be manifest, however, that there are a hundred cases of imitation of the many for one case where the entire mass throughout obeys a single person. In accounting for the mob, hypnosis has no such scope of application as the theory of mental intimidation. If we suppose that the eye of the leader or the gesture of the orator paralyzes the will of the crowd as the "bright object" of the hypnotizer overcomes his subject, we shall not get the mob without presence. But if the secret of its unanimity lies in mass suggestion, why is presence necessary? May there not be mob phenomena in a multitude of people not collected at one spot within sight and sound of each other?
It has long been recognized that the behavior of city populations under excitement shows the familiar characteristics of the mob quite apart from any thronging. Here we get unanimity,impulsiveness, exaggeration of feeling, excessive credulity, fickleness, inability to reason, and sudden alternations of boldness and cowardice. In fact, if you translate these qualities into public policy, you have the chief counts in the indictment which historians have drawn against the city democracies of old Greece and mediæval Italy.
These faults are due in part to the nervous strains of great cities. The continual bombardment of the attention by innumerable sense impressions is known to produce neurasthenia or hysteria, the peculiar malady of the city dweller. Then, too, there thrive in the sheltered life of the city many mental degenerates that would be unsparingly eliminated by the sterner conditions of existence in the country. But aside from this the behavior of city dwellers under excitement can best be understood as the result of mental contacts made possible by easy communication. While the crowd, with its elbow-touch and its heat has no doubt a maddening all its own, the main thing in it is the contact of minds. Let this be given, and the three consequences I have pointed out must follow. An expectant or excited man learns that a thousand of his fellow-townsmen have been seized by a certain strong feeling, and meets with their expression of this feeling. Each of these townsmen learns how many others
