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Updated: May 27, 2025
At length then have I liberty to yawn a freedom whereof doubtless my readers have long been liverymen: I have written myself and my inkstand dry as Rosamond's pond; my brain is relieved, recreated, emptied; I go no longer heavily, as one that mourneth; and with gleeful face can I assure you that your author's mind is once again as light as his heart: but when crowding fancies come thick upon it, they bow it, and break it, and weary it, as clouds of pigeons settling gregariously on a trans-Atlantic forest; and when those thronging thoughts are comfortably fixed on paper, one feels, as an apple-tree may be supposed to feel, all the difference between the heavy down-dragging crop of autumn and the winged aërial blossom of sweet spring-tide.
Men acting gregariously are always in extremes. As they are one moment capable of higher courage, so they are liable, the next, to baser depression, and it is often a matter of chance whether numbers shall multiply confidence or discouragement. Nor does deception lead more surely to distrust of men than self-deception to suspicion of principles.
The outstanding fact about our modern machine civilization and its troubles is that crowd-thinking has seized the people that people see things and do things gregariously. We have herds of fractions of men, acting as fractions of men and not as human beings. Each fraction is trying to get the whole country to be a fraction. Being a fraction themselves they want a fraction of a country.
Shirt-sleeved householders, leaning against their door-posts smoking, exchanged ideas across the narrow space paved with cobble-stones which separated their small and ancient houses, while the matrons, more gregariously inclined, bunched in little groups and discussed subjects which in higher circles would have inundated the land with libel actions.
Shirt-sleeved householders, leaning against their door-posts smoking, exchanged ideas across the narrow space paved with cobble-stones which separated their small and ancient houses, while the matrons, more gregariously inclined, bunched in little groups and discussed subjects which in higher circles would have inundated the land with libel actions.
Here and there a man, utterly overcome by sleep, lurched from his saddle, pitched headlong and lay where he had fallen until one more wakeful picked him up and set him on his waiting horse again or in an ambulance. Some tied themselves on gun-limbers and slept there, while their riderless horses gregariously followed the column. A slumbering, ghostly army, moving like automata.
In the centre of the mean and uninviting apartment stood a table, its top littered with odds and ends, amongst which the remains of a meal, dishes and food, fraternised gregariously with a painter's palette, brushes and paint tubes. A chair or two, long since disabled, and a rickety washstand completed the appointments.
The real pioneer never emigrates gregariously; he does not wish to be within "halloo" of his nearest neighbor; he is no city-builder; and, if he does project a town, he christens it by some such name as Boonville or Clarksville, in memory of a noted pioneer: or Jacksonville or Waynesville, to commemorate some "old hero" who was celebrated for good fighting.
The sagacity of the pigs is probably, in part at least, to be attributed to the fact that in their native state they are communal animals, all the species of their family being accustomed to live gregariously, so that for ages they have had the training which every social organization, however simple, affords.
We simians naturally admire a profession full of wrangle and chatter. But that is a monkeyish way of deciding disputes, not feline. We fight best in armies, gregariously, where the risk is reduced; but we disapprove usually of murderers, and of almost all private combat. With the great cats, it would have been just the other way round.
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