[16] My first observations with regard to the art of impressing crowds and touching the slight assistance to be derived in this connection from the rules of logic date back to the seige of Paris, to the day when I saw conducted to the Louvre, where the Government was then sitting, Marshal V----, whom a furious crowd asserted they had surprised in the act of taking the plans of the fortifications to sell them to the Prussians.A member of the Government (G.P----), a very celebrated orator, came out to harangue the crowd, which was demanding the immediate execution of the prisoner.I had expected that the speaker would point out the absurdity of the accusation by remarking that the accused Marshal was positively one of those who had constructed the fortifications, the plan of which, moreover, was on sale at every booksellers.To my immense stupefaction--I was very young then--the speech was on quite different lines."Justice shall be done," exclaimed the orator, advancing towards the prisoner, "and pitiless justice.Let the Government of the National Defence conclude your inquiry.In the meantime we will keep the prisoner in custody." At once calmed by this apparent concession, the crowd broke up, and a quarter of an hour later the Marshal was able to return home.He would infallibly have been torn in pieces had the speaker treated the infuriated crowd to the logical arguments that my extreme youth induced me to consider as very convincing.
Logical minds, accustomed to be convinced by a chain of somewhat close reasoning, cannot avoid having recourse to this mode of persuasion when addressing crowds, and the inability of their arguments always surprises them."The usual mathematical consequences based on the syllogism--that is, on associations of identities--are imperative..." writes a logician."This imperativeness would enforce the assent even of an inorganic mass were it capable of following associations of identities." This is doubtless true, but a crowd is no more capable than an inorganic mass of following such associations, nor even of understanding them.If the attempt be made to convince by reasoning primitive minds--savages or children, for instance--the slight value possessed by this method of arguing will be understood.
It is not even necessary to descend so low as primitive beings to obtain an insight into the utter powerlessness of reasoning when it has to fight against sentiment.Let us merely call to mind how tenacious, for centuries long, have been religious superstitions in contradiction with the simplest logic.For nearly two thousand years the most luminous geniuses have bowed before their laws, and modern times have to be reached for their veracity to be merely contested.The Middle Ages and the Renaissance possessed many enlightened men, but not a single man who attained by reasoning to an appreciation of the childish side of his superstitions, or who promulgated even a slight doubt as to the misdeeds of the devil or the necessity of burning sorcerers.
Should it be regretted that crowds are never guided by reason?
We would not venture to affirm it.Without a doubt human reason would not have availed to spur humanity along the path of civilisation with the ardour and hardihood its illusions have done.These illusions, the offspring of those unconscious forces by which we are led, were doubtless necessary.Every race carries in its mental constitution the laws of its destiny, and it is, perhaps, these laws that it obeys with a resistless impulse, even in the case of those of its impulses which apparently are the most unreasoned.It seems at times as if nations were submitted to secret forces analogous to those which compel the acorn to transform itself into an oak or a comet to follow its orbit.
What little insight we can get into these forces must be sought for in the general course of the evolution of a people, and not in the isolated facts from which this evolution appears at times to proceed.Were these facts alone to be taken into consideration, history would seem to be the result of a series of improbable chances.It was improbable that a Galilean carpenter should become for two thousand years an all-powerful God in whose name the most important civilisations were founded; improbable, too, that a few bands of Arabs, emerging from their deserts, should conquer the greater part of the old Graco-Roman world, and establish an empire greater than that of Alexander; improbable, again, that in Europe, at an advanced period of its development, and when authority throughout it had been systematically hierarchised, an obscure lieutenant of artillery should have succeeded in reigning over a multitude of peoples and kings.
Let us leave reason, then, to philosophers, and not insist too strongly on its intervention in the governing of men.It is not by reason, but most often in spite of it, that are created those sentiments that are the mainsprings of all civilisation--sentiments such as honour, self- sacrifice, religious faith, patriotism, and the love of glory.
