No doubt he has great qualities of sympathy,
comprehension, understanding, tact, efficient power, in order to become
a chief; but he leads by following, he relies on his sense of public
support, he rises by virtue of the common will, the common sense, which
store themselves in him. Such the leaders of the people have always
been.
If this process--and it is to be observed that as the scale of power
rises the more limited elements of social influence enter into the
result with more determining force--be apparently crude in its early
stages, and imperfect at the best, is it different from the process of
social expansion in other parts of life? Wherever masses of men are
entering upon a rising and larger life, do not the same phenomena occur?
in religion, for example, was there not a similar popular crudity, as it
is termed by some, a vulgarity as others name it, in the Methodist
movement, in the Presbyterian movement, in the Protestant movement,
world-wide? Was English Puritanism free from the same sort of
characteristics, the things that are unrefined as belong to democratic
politics in another sphere? The method, the phenomena, are those that
belong to life universal, if life be free and efficient in moving masses
of men upward into more noble ranges.
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