The leaders of crowds wield a very despotic authority, and this despotism indeed is a condition of their obtaining a following.
It has often been remarked how easily they extort obedience, although without any means of backing up their authority, from the most turbulent section of the working classes.They fix the hours of labour and the rate of wages, and they decree strikes, which are begun and ended at the hour they ordain.
At the present day these leaders and agitators tend more and more to usurp the place of the public authorities in proportion as the latter allow themselves to be called in question and shorn of their strength.The tyranny of these new masters has for result that the crowds obey them much more docilely than they have obeyed any government.If in consequence of some accident or other the leaders should be removed from the scene the crowd returns to its original state of a collectivity without cohesion or force of resistance.During the last strike of the Parisian omnibus employes the arrest of the two leaders who were directing it was at once sufficient to bring it to an end.It is the need not of liberty but of servitude that is always predominant in the soul of crowds.They are so bent on obedience that they instinctively submit to whoever declares himself their master.
These ringleaders and agitators may be divided into two clearly defined classes.The one includes the men who are energetic and possess, but only intermittently, much strength of will, the other the men, far rarer than the preceding, whose strength of will is enduring.The first mentioned are violent, brave, and audacious.They are more especially useful to direct a violent enterprise suddenly decided on, to carry the masses with them in spite of danger, and to transform into heroes the men who but yesterday were recruits.Men of this kind were Ney and Murat under the First Empire, and such a man in our own time was Garibaldi, a talentless but energetic adventurer who succeeded with a handful of men in laying hands on the ancient kingdom of Naples, defended though it was by a disciplined army.
Still, though the energy of leaders of this class is a force to be reckoned with, it is transitory, and scarcely outlasts the exciting cause that has brought it into play.When they have returned to their ordinary course of life the heroes animated by energy of this description often evince, as was the case with those I have just cited, the most astonishing weakness of character.They seem incapable of reflection and of conducting themselves under the simplest circumstances, although they had been able to lead others.These men are leaders who cannot exercise their function except on the condition that they be led themselves and continually stimulated, that they have always as their beacon a man or an idea, that they follow a line of conduct clearly traced.The second category of leaders, that of men of enduring strength of will, have, in spite of a less brilliant aspect, a much more considerable influence.In this category are to be found the true founders of religions and great undertakings: St.Paul, Mahomet, Christopher Columbus, and de Lesseps, for example.Whether they be intelligent or narrow-minded is of no importance: the world belongs to them.
The persistent will-force they possess is an immensely rare and immensely powerful faculty to which everything yields.What a strong and continuous will is capable of is not always properly appreciated.Nothing resists it; neither nature, gods, nor man.
The most recent example of what can be effected by a strong and continuous will is afforded us by the illustrious man who separated the Eastern and Western worlds, and accomplished a task that during three thousand years had been attempted in vain by the greatest sovereigns.He failed later in an identical enterprise, but then had intervened old age, to which everything, even the will, succumbs.
When it is desired to show what may be done by mere strength of will, all that is necessary is to relate in detail the history of the difficulties that had to be surmounted in connection with the cutting of the Suez Canal.An ocular witness, Dr.Cazalis, has summed up in a few striking lines the entire story of this great work, recounted by its immortal author.
"From day to day, episode by episode, he told the stupendous story of the canal.He told of all he had had to vanquish, of the impossible he had made possible, of all the opposition he encountered, of the coalition against him, and the disappointments, the reverses, the defeats which had been unavailing to discourage or depress him.He recalled how England had combatted him, attacking him without cessation, how Egypt and France had hesitated, how the French Consul had been foremost in his opposition to the early stages of the work, and the nature of the opposition he had met with, the attempt to force his workmen to desert from thirst by refusing them fresh water; how the Minister of Marine and the engineers, all responsible men of experienced and scientific training, had naturally all been hostile, were all certain on scientific grounds that disaster was at hand, had calculated its coming, foretelling it for such a day and hour as an eclipse is foretold."The book which relates the lives of all these great leaders would not contain many names, but these names have been bound up with the most important events in the history of civilisation.
