THE "PROXIMATE INITIATOR" 63 



capacity for organising his staff of cooks, waiters, Book i 

 and chamber-maids. This is well expressed by that 

 most significant American saying, " He's a smart 

 man, but he couldn't keep a hotel"; the meaning 

 being that one of the most important, and at the 

 same time one of the rarest faculties required for 

 maintaining a complicated civilisation like our own 

 is the faculty by which, given a number of tasks, one 

 man governs a number of men in the act of co- 

 operatively performing them. 



Examples of this kind might be indefinitely AH these men 

 multiplied, but those just adduced are quite sufficient jjreat military 

 to prove the sole point insisted on at the present ^Se latter 

 moment namely, that whatever be the part (and IS a social 



' ' cause, so are 



Mr. Spencer admits it to be "all-important ") which the former, 

 the great man plays as a leader in primitive war- 

 fare, a part precisely similar in kind is played by 

 other great men in the peaceful processes, and, 

 above all, in the progress of civilisation. 



And now, having dealt with this point, let us turn Next, as to the 



-..-/-. , i ... . contention that 



to Mr. Spencers other contention his contention t h e great man 

 namely that, whatever the part may be, and however mate 6 cause 

 seemingly important, which the great man plays in ^t'rue" 1 not 

 producing social changes, he is, in any case, nothing cause- 

 but their "proximate initiator"; that "they have 

 their chief cause in the generations he descended 

 from " ; and that if there is to be anything like 

 a real and scientific explanation of them, it must 

 be sought in the aggregate of conditions out of 

 which both he and they have arisen, and not in 

 the great man's personality as revealed to us by any 



