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 fear and anger--when they are consciously shared by many physically associated individuals, may become enormously exalted, and may give rise to violent nervous disturbances.

One may suppose that this fact, like the existence of laughter, was originally an accidental and undesirable result of the mechanism of nervous reaction, and that it persisted because when a common danger was realised (a forest fire, for instance, or an attack by beasts of prey), a general stampede, although it might be fatal to the weaker members of the herd, was the best chance of safety for the majority.
My own observation of English politics suggests that in a modern national state, this panic effect of the combination of nervous excitement with physical contact is not of great importance.