fear and anger—­when they are consciously shared by many physically associated individuals, may become enormously exalted, and may give rise to violent nervous disturbances.  One may suppose that this fact, like the existence of laughter, was originally an accidental and undesirable result of the mechanism of nervous reaction, and that it persisted because when a common danger was realised (a forest fire, for instance, or an attack by beasts of prey), a general stampede, although it might be fatal to the weaker members of the herd, was the best chance of safety for the majority.

My own observation of English politics suggests that in a modern national state, this panic effect of the combination of nervous excitement with physical contact is not of great importance.  London in the twentieth century is very unlike Paris in the eighteenth century, or Florence in the fourteenth, if only because it is very difficult for any considerable proportion of the citizens to be gathered under circumstances likely to produce the special ‘Psychology of the Crowd.’  I have watched two hundred thousand men assembled in Hyde Park for a Labour Demonstration.  The scattered platforms, the fresh air, the wide grassy space, seemed to be an unsuitable environment for the production of purely instinctive excitement, and the attitude of such an assembly in London is good-tempered and lethargic.  A crowd in a narrow street is more likely to get ‘out of hand,’ and one may see a few thousand men in a large hall reach a state approaching genuine pathological exaltation on an exciting occasion, and when they are in the hands of a practised speaker.  But as they go out of the hall they drop into the cool ocean of London, and their mood is dissipated in a moment.  The mob that took the Bastille would not seem or feel an overwhelming force in one of the business streets of Manchester.  Yet such facts vary greatly among different races, and the exaggeration which one seems to notice when reading the French sociologists on this point may be due to their observations having been made among a Latin and not a Northern race.

So far I have dealt with the impulses illustrated by the internal politics of a modern State.  But perhaps the most important section in the whole psychology of political impulse is that which is concerned not with the emotional effect of the citizens of any state upon each other, but with those racial feelings which reveal themselves in international politics.  The future peace of the world largely turns on the question whether we have, as is sometimes said and often assumed, an instinctive affection for those human beings whose features and colour are like our own, combined with an instinctive hatred for those who are unlike us.  On this point, pending a careful examination of the evidence by the psychologists, it is difficult to dogmatise.  But I am inclined to think that those strong and apparently simple cases of racial hatred and affection which can certainly