596 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



"born leaders." We seldom meet them. Leadership is rarely a 

 flash of genius. It is a growth, a patient development. Like 

 most genius, it is the result of hard work, painstaking prepara- 

 tion, a process of adequate education and discipline, resulting 

 in the progressive outgrowing of one's self into the mental and 

 spiritual stature of efficient leadership. Neither do I conceive 

 of leadership as an abstract entity, or something you can isolate, 

 objectify, and gaze at, quite apart from human usefulness and 

 specific functioning. As I do not accept the old "formal-disci- 

 pline" theory of education, "mental discipline in general" 

 means little or nothing to me. And just as I cannot believe 

 in "general training of the judgment," for instance, I take little 

 stock in leadership in general as a personal asset or endowment. 

 Leadership is revealed only in specific functioning. 



However, I think that there are five elemental factors which 

 are always found in some degree in leadership. They seem to 

 me essential in all kinds of worth-while leadership. They are 

 knowledge, power, skill, character, and vision knowledge, the 

 result of study and instruction, the master}^ and' correlation of 

 facts; power, the result of personal development, the storing 

 of vital energy in personality ; skill, the result of training, power 

 guided by knowledge and made facile through practice; char- 

 acter, the moral element essential in all genuine leadership, the 

 resultant of moral living, "an organized set of good habits of 

 reaction"; and vision, the result of living the climbing life and 

 developing constructive imagination. It is the leader's vision 

 which steadies our confidence in him ; for we trust only the leader 

 who can see things whole and in their relations. 



Rural Life Needs the Best. I make no apology for trying to 

 apply these high ideals of leadership to the social needs of 

 country life. Oberlin College was named eighty-three years ago 

 for a great Alsatian community leader and philanthropist, Jean 

 Frederic Oberlin, who had died seven years before that date 

 after a long career of usefulness. He was an educational 

 prophet anticipating Froebel by forty years in his own specialty. 

 He was perhaps the greatest country pastor in history. He was 

 a community builder, a civilization restorer, whose services won 

 the medal of the Legion of Honor from his king, Louis XVIII. 

 He represented the flower of eighteenth-century French culture, 



