From ‘The Impulse of the Phalanx’, The Spectator, 10 July 1915:
A mass of men, large enough to be beyond the control of any immediate words of command, is a difficult thing to stop when once it has been set in motion. It acquires a momentum of its own. The wills of individuals become submerged in the will, or what may pass for the will, of the mass. They respond to an impulse which nobody could precisely trace or define. In a very rough manner one sees the process at work when a crowd comes out of a public building. Perhaps no one is conscious of pushing—every one may rather be conscious of resisting pressure and of trying to hold back—and yet the column of people is a thing of undeniable weight driving in one direction, and going rather faster and more uncomfortably than any one desires.
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