Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds

by Charles Mackay

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Eight days afterwards the concourse of people was so tremendous that fifteen persons were squeezed to death at the doors of the bank.

Oh my god????

The public mind was in a state of unwholesome fermentation. Men were no longer satisfied with the slow but sure profits of cautious industry. The hope of boundless wealth for the morrow made them heedless and extravagant for to-day. A luxury, till then unheard of, was introduced, bringing in its train a corresponding laxity of morals.

Popular imitativeness will always, in a trading nation, seize hold of such successes, and drag a community too anxious for profits into an abyss from which extrication is difficult.