Up to now these thoroughgoing destructions of a worn-out
civilisation have constituted the most obvious task of the
masses. It is not indeed to-day merely that this can be traced.
History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on
which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final
dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal
crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians. Civilisations
as yet have only been created and directed by a small
intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only
powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a
barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules,
discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state,
forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture--all of
them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably
shown themselves incapable of realising. In consequence of the
purely destructive nature of their power crowds act like those
microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead
bodies. When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is
always the masses that bring about its downfall. It is at such a
juncture that their chief mission is plainly visible, and that
for a while the philosophy of number seems the only philosophy of
history.

Is the same fate in store for our civilisation? There is ground
to fear that this is the case, but we are not as yet in a
position to be certain of it.

However this may be, we are bound to resign ourselves to the
reign of the masses, since want of foresight has in succession