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. Again, we may refer to the curious example of mass-impulse in a lower stage of life provided by the Scandinavian lemmings — curious little creatures which are half mice, half voles. At irregular periods the lemmings of Norway, which live in the upland forests, descend in innumerable masses to the cultivated lower lands. Their own habitations have become over-populated, or —which is almost the same thing—under-supplied with food. The lemmings, in the grip of some ungovernable instinct, march onwards across the cultivated tracts. They eat and they breed—breed prolifically—as they go. They are a phalanx. They always follow the same direction. They do not move fast; they are undeterred by the appalling slaughter they suffer; and they never turn back. If they start from the eastern edge of the forests they make for the Gulf of Bothnia, and if they start from the western edge of the forests they make for the Atlantic. Men kill them in thousands; cattle trample on them; wolves harry them; birds of prey swoop on them from the sky. But still they go on. Their journey may last a year, two years, three years. But the ending is always the same. Having successfully swum fjords, lakes, and rivers in their uncontrollable advance, they come at last to the sea and try to swim across that. Instinct, more powerful than the Elfensiegen of any Pied Piper, carries them on.
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