tory, it may justly be
considered, was the history of these.... Could we see _them_ well, we
should get some glimpses into the very marrow of the world's
history.[1]

[Footnote 1: Carlyle: _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, Lecture I.]

Later Nietzsche made much of this same idea, of the Superman
striding through the world and changing its destiny,
although in Nietzsche the Superman was an end in himself
rather than the servant of the world in which he lived.

To most historical writers to-day the forces at work in history
are much too complex to be dismissed with any such
simple melodrama. But there remain striking testimonies
of the influence of leaders. The sweep of Mohammedanism
into Europe was initiated by the burning and contagious zeal
of one religious enthusiast. The campaign against slavery
in this country assumed large proportions through the strenuous
leadership of the Garrisons and the Wendell Phillipses.
In our own day we have seen the same phenomenon; the
great political and social changes of the last generation have
all had their special advocates and leaders who, if they were
merely expressing the "spirit of the times," yet did give that
spirit expression. Every reform or revolution has its leading
spirits. That leadership is not the one essential goes without
saying; there have been great guides of repeatedly lost causes.
But many great causes may have been lost through the want
of good leadership.

In contemporary life leadership is not always directly personal,
but is carried on through the medium of the newspapers
and periodicals. But this merely means that a leader
may reach a wider audience; he reaches thousands through
picture and print, instead of hundreds by word of mouth.

Qualities of leadership may be utilized in the support of
the customary or the established, as well as in initiation and
support of the novel. People ape the great, or those that pass
for great, in manners and morals. The words of a distinguished
public man have prestige in the maintenance of the
established. Men _will_ follow, and if the socially conspicuous
lead them along the ways of the established, they will follow
there as readily and, being creatures of habit, often more
readily than along new paths. The immense following among
the lower social classes that the Conservative Party had in
England all through the nineteenth century in the face of
proposed changes that would have bettered their own conditions,
is an int