iefer course, p. 34.]

The impulse to follow and submit to something not ourselves
and more dominating than ourselves is very strong in
most men, and is called out by stimuli much less violent than
those physical manifestations of power mentioned in the
above quotation. Men instinctively long to be led, especially
if, as happens in the case of most individuals, there is in them
a marked absence of definite interest, conviction, or skill.
This instinct is aroused by any sign of exceptional power, or,
more generally still, by any exceptional conspicuousness,
whether socially useful or not. Men follow leaders partly
because men live in groups with common interests and in any
large-scale organization leadership is necessary. But the
power of demagogues, the faithfulness with which men will
follow a bad leader as well as a good, are evidence that men find
an instinctive satisfaction in submission. Self-dependence
stands out as a virtue or an accomplishment precisely because
most men feel so utterly at sea without any loyalty, allegiance,
or devotion. Any one who has spent a summer at a
boy's camp will recall the helplessness of youngsters to mark
out a program for themselves and to keep themselves happy
on the one afternoon when there was no official program of
play. Half the mischief performed on such occasions is initiated
by some boy with just a little more independence and
persuasiveness than the others. And it is not only among
children that there is evinced an almost pathetic bewilderment
and unrest in the absence of a leader. There is an
equally pathetic and sometimes dangerous attachment among
adults to the first sign of leadership that makes its appearance.
The demoralizing authority of the ward heeler is sometimes
dependent on no more trustworthy an index of real power
than a booming voice, a rough _camaraderie_, and a physically
"big" personality. And there are, on the other hand,
instances where lack of leadership seemed to be the chief reason
why certain classes of labor were unable to make their
demands effective at a much earlier date than they did. In the
first really big strike in the telephone industry in Boston
during the autumn of 1918 success seems to have been chiefly due
to the remarkable leadership of one of the young women
operators, a type of leadership which seems to have appeared
nowhere else in the telephone industry.[1]

[Footnote 1: See the article by Wm. Hard in the _New Republic_, May 3