ORGANISATIONS. 383 



result is a challenge and a duel, command remaining with, 

 or pertaining to, the victor, be he young or old. 



Naturally it is usually the younger antagonist that out- 

 strips the older. While this success is a source of exultation 

 to the one, it is a cause of humiliation in the other ; and the 

 sense of defeat, deposition, and degradation may be so keen 

 as to lead to fatal pining from grief: the disgraced chief, in 

 short, sometimes dies of his shame. 



The principle of appointment in the case of all kinds of 

 animal leaders is that the strongest, boldest, best in every 

 way, should be called to the front and invested with supreme 

 power ; and this principle actuates man equally with other 

 animals in the selection of an animal chief. Man chooses 

 and instals a leading mule, horse, dog, or ram on the very 

 same principle that leads a flock or herd to acquiesce in the 

 self-appointment of some victorious young male. In human 

 emergency of a serious kind, and on a large or public scale, 

 it frequently happens that some man of marked individuality, 

 but previously unknown, comes to the front as a volunteer 

 leader, no one knows how, and his supremacy is at once, by 

 tacit consent, acknowledged. Average people feel that he is 

 'the right man for the right place;' he has the requisite 

 force of character, patriotism, and the ability to command 

 universal confidence and universal confidence is forthwith 

 accorded, for the time. 



For the man of the time is as liable to be discarded by a 

 fickle people or populace as the proud and splendid stallion 

 when he begins to lose that most indefinable of all qualities, 

 popularity. So in animal panics, for instance, some previ- 

 ously unobserved or undistinguished individual starts, lite- 

 rally in this case, to the front, and is followed, for weal or 

 woe, by the rest of a troop, herd, or flock. 



There is ample evidence to show that self-appointment to 

 the leadership is common among social animals ; that the 

 ambition of some young, energetic, vigorous male urges it to 

 challenge and defeat the reigning chief, a defeat that is tan- 

 tamount to the compulsory deposition of the one and the 

 self-instalment of the other. This new appointment, how- 

 ever, is, under the circumstances, homologated or ratified by 

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