Politics & Power Quote by Ray Stannard Baker

The jab in Baker's line is the way it flips the self-image of the crowd. A "mob" isn not framed as outsiders, villains, or the usual cinematic bad guys; it's a method, a mechanism that lets "good citizens" outsource their agency and launder their responsibility. The sting is moral and procedural at once: the same people who claim to be the backbone of order can, under the cover of numbers, dissolve the very idea of accountability that citizenship is supposed to require.

Baker was a Progressive Era journalist, writing in a period when faith in institutions was under stress and mass politics was becoming modern: labor unrest, race riots, lynching, wartime hysteria, and the temptations of moral crusades that could curdle into vigilantism. In that climate, the mob isn't just violence; it's governance by impulse. His wording treats the crowd like a backdoor coup. No manifesto, no election, just a sudden transfer of power from law to appetite.

The subtext is a warning about respectability as a catalyst. "Good citizens" are not immune; they're the accelerant. When people who benefit from the rules decide the rules are too slow, too tolerant, too procedural, they end up empowering exactly the "criminal or irresponsible" forces they claim to fear. Baker isn't romanticizing order; he's diagnosing how fragile it is, and how quickly civic virtue can become a costume for collective lawlessness.