A crowd is always ready to revolt against a feeble,and to bow down servilely before a strong authority. Should the strength of an authority be intermittent,the crowd, always obedient to its extreme sentiments,passes alternately from anarchy to servitude, and from servitude to anarchy.
However, to believe in the predominance among crowds of revolutionary instincts would be to entirely misconstrue their psychology. It is merely their tendency to violence that deceives us on this point.Their rebellious and destructive outbursts are always very transitory. Crowds are too much governed by unconscious considerations, and too much subject in consequence to secular hereditary influences not to be extremely conservative. Abandoned to themselves,they soon weary of disorder, and instinctively turn to servitude. It was the proudest and most untractable of the Jacobins who acclaimed Bonaparte with greatest energy when he suppressed all liberty and made his hand of iron severely felt.