he is expected to receive every caller at any hour of the day or night with the same hearty good will, and to be always ready to share or excite the enthusiasm of his followers.  After a year or two, in the case of a man of sensitive nervous organisation, the task is found to be impossible.  The signs of nervous fatigue are at first accepted by him and his friends as proofs of his sincerity.  He begins to suffer from the curate’s disease, the bright-eyed, hysterical condition in which a man talks all day long to a succession of sympathetic hearers about his own overwork, and drifts into actual ill-health, though he is not making an hour’s continuous exertion in the day.  I knew a young agitator in that state who thought that he could not make a propagandist speech unless the deeply admiring pitman, in whose cottage he was staying, played the Marseillaise on a harmonium before he started.  Often such a man takes to drink.  In any case he is liable, as the East End clergymen who try to live the same life are liable, to the most pitiable forms of moral collapse.

Such men, however, are those who being unfit for a life without privacy, do not survive.  Greater political danger comes perhaps from those who are comparatively fit.  Any one who has been in America, who has stood among the crowd in a Philadelphian law-court during the trial of a political case, or has seen the thousands of cartoons in a contest in which Tammany is concerned, will find that he has a picture in his mind of one type at least of those who do survive.

Powerfully built, with the big jaw and loose mouth of the dominant talker, practised by years of sitting behind saloon bars, they have learnt the way of ‘selling cheap that which should be most dear.’  But even they generally look as if they drank, and as if they would not live to old age.

Other and less dreadful types of politicians without privacy come into one’s mind, the orator who night after night repeats the theatrical success of his own personality, and, like the actor, keeps his recurring fits of weary disgust to himself; the busy organising talkative man to whom it is a mere delight to take the chair at four smoking concerts a week.  But there is no one of them who would not be the better, both in health and working power, if he were compelled to retire for six months from the public view, and to produce something with his own hand and brain, or even to sit alone in his own house and think.

These facts, in so far as they represent the nervous disturbance produced by certain conditions of life in political communities, are again closely connected with the one point in the special psychology of politics which has as yet received any extensive consideration—­the so-called ‘Psychology of the Crowd,’ on which the late M. Tarde, M. Le Bon, and others have written.  In the case of human beings, as in the case of many other social and semi-social animals, the simpler impulses—­especially those of