carry it, as to attribute to him the whole merit of the great deeds of patriotic exaltation and of the great acts of devotion excited by the same fever. We may, therefore, always hold the chiefs of a band or a riot accountable for the astuteness and dexterity it displays in the execution of its maneuvers, robberies, and acts of incendiarism, but not always for the violence and extent of the evils caused by its criminal contagions. The general alone is entitled to credit for the plan of the campaign, but not for the bravery of his soldiers. I do not say that this distinction is adequate to simplify all the problems of responsibility raised by our subject, but it will be well to regard it in trying to solve them.
From the intellectual as well as from other points of view, considerable differences may be established between the various forms of social groups. We do not include those which consist in a simple material bringing together of people. Passers in a thronged street, travelers meeting or thrown together on a packet boat, in a railway carriage, or around a dinner table, silent or without general conversation with one another, are grouped physically, not socially. As much may be said of countrymen congregated at a fair, as long as they do nothing but trade with one another, seeking each his own objects, even though they be alike, without co-operation in any common act. All that can be said of this sort of folk is that they bear in themselves the potentiality of a social group, so far as resemblances of language, nationality, religion, class, or education may dispose them to associate more or less closely, if occasion should require. Should an explosion of dynamite take place in the street, the vessel be in danger of foundering, the train run off from the track, a fire break out in the hotel, or a rumor about some forestaller spread through the market, the associable individuals would at once become associates in the pursuit of an identical purpose under the dominion of an identical emotion.
Thus may arise spontaneously the first stage of the association which we call the mob. By a series of intermediate steps there is raised from this rudimentary, fugacious, and amorphous aggregation, the organized, chief-led, persistent, and regular mob, which may be called the corporation, in the widest sense of the word. The most intense expression of the religious corporation is the monastery; of the lay corporation, the regiment or the workshop. The widest expression of the two is the church or the state. It may indeed be remarked that churches and states, religions and nations, are always tending, in their period of robust growth, to realize the corporative type, monastic or regimental, without, fortunately, ever quite reaching it. Their historical life is passed in oscillating from one type to the other; in giving the impression by turns of a great mob, like the Barbary States, or of
