*8 
LAND & WATER 
May 3, IQ17 
used for slaNnng the loo and not merely (or;lxMng shaij^ffned 
im one anotiier let vis su])]wse. 1 say. that this wise jioople 
chooses its pilot and gives him charge to wvather the st<um. 
How will they treat him 'f The answer is given in four 
words. '/Vie'V it;// /mat him. And hy trusting him, and 
■ i-ausing him to ftrl that hi- is tiustKl. tluy will strengtiun 
Jiis hands. Herein thiy will know, and be proud to know. 
that they are loyal to the democratic principle in its purest 
form. No man among them shall say " yon pilot is a menace 
to our liberty." They will say rather " he is the guardian of 
our libertv and as such we, who have freely chosen him to 
carry our burden, will trust him. honour him, uphold him." 
Thus it will be seen that tlie question how to treat great men 
is largely a question of good manners. When, some weeks ago. 
1 wrote in L.\.\i) & W.vruR tm the importance of good manners 
to the health and stability of a great' nation some persons 
supposed that bygood manners I meant such things as taking 
off your hat when \'ou say good-bye to your sister, or not 
making a gobbling noise when you eat soup. I was really 
thinking of the " charity that never faileth " and of the other 
. points in good manners so tersely summarised In' St. Paul in 
the Thirteenth Cliapter of First Corinthians. .\ik1 1 was 
thinking oi all this with particular reference to our current 
methods of treating great men. In these there is \ery little 
of the charity that never faileth, nor of any other of those 
essential principles which St. Paul lays down as the heart 
and soul of good manners. In fact the manners of the 
British. Democracv towards its great men are not good. 
And a consideration of the deplorable effects which follow 
(fom this ought to convince the most sceptical that there 
^re some situations where good manners are even more 
. important than good morals. 
For example many of us have a disgusting habit of 
suspecting that every great man wants to become a dictator 
■^ one 01 the meanest motives ^,ou could attribute to any 
' man, and a foul insult when attributed to a great one. It is 
"nil asinine and scoundrelly thing to harbour such a suspicion. 
Who but an ass would appoint a man to perform a task which 
only an independent s])irit could tackle, and then suspect 
him of wanting to be a dictator because forsooth he shows 
.. independence of spirit ? And who but a scoundrel would 
say to a man " I will trust you to see this tiling through " 
,:and then charge him with personal ambition, and tell other 
'mean stories to his discredit the moment he sets his hand 
to the plough ? And yet that is the way in which 
many of us are accustomed to treat our great men. It is 
a demoralizing business for all concerned ; demoralizing. 
for the great men, who are sometimes driven by despair to 
play down their detractors, and , so. become what they are 
suspected of Ix'ing ; demorahzing for, the detractors, whose 
vanity it feeds and whose pettiness it accentuates. 
The desire to become a dictator is the characteristic vice of 
a little man, and we may take it as demonstrably certain that 
no man who is truly great is capable of harbouring any such 
desire. Yet the position is .somewhat paradoxical. For 
while it is true on the one hand that no great man ever wants 
to be a dictator, it is equally true on the other that he cannot 
lielp dictating. That in tact, is what he is for; what he 
has been appointed to do. If all you require at the 
head of affairs is a person who will do what he is told to do 
by the public, or by the press, or by the leading ladies of . 
London Society, any diligent fool, any well-groomed nonentity 
will serve your purpose. In fact the hero's valet will do the 
business Ix'tter than the hero himself. Is it not a folly, nay 
a crime, to waste a hero by giving him such a job ? Was 
there ever perversity like tins ? Was there ever an exhibftion 
of worse manners ? It is vulgarity gone mad. 
Now there arc two tests of the greatness of a people. One 
is its capacity for producing great men, so as to have them 
ready and at hand when a crisis or emergency has to be met. 
The other is right treatment of the great men when they 
are produced. The two tests realjy go together. Great 
men will not be produced, or at least they will not come forward 
unless there is a fair chance that the public will treat them 
well. On the other hand if the public treats them badly they will 
Ix- spoilt, and instead of ha\'ing great men for our examples 
we shall have only spoiled great men,, that is the worst kind 
of example conceivable. Put it either way and the result 
is the same. The public will get for its leaders none but the 
second-rate men who, just iK'cause they are second-rate, do 
not wince when they hear themselves suspected of .wanting 
to be dictators, which in their t~ase is conceivably true, 
.\s to the production of great men— the actual b'rieding 
of them — I am not competent to offer any suggestions and 
must leave the whole question to the liugenists or other ex- 
perts. On the whole I am inclined tii think that in the demo- 
cratic communities the matter of breeding this particular 
class of men had better be left to look after itself. 
To say of any irum that he is great is only another way, of 
saying he can be trusted. Lnless we trust him he is of very 
little use to us. His greatness, so to speak, is thrown away. 
•To. mistnist hiiu! or simply not to trust him, is bad both 
for us and for him : bad for us, because, as I have said, it 
leads us to cultivate our own littleness ; bad f(»r him because 
it compels, him to fritter away the time and energy needed 
for doing our business, in defending himself against our 
mistrust or our criticisms. F"or exami)le, .Mr. As<iuitli, not 
to s])eak of others, has had to waste an enormous amount of 
time in the course of liis political car^r, and especiallv of 
late, in defending himself from the attacks of lesser men than 
himself. All through his political life he has been standing up 
to be shot at by such men. I think .Mr. .^squith is, truly, 
a great man ; but if any one demurs to that he can 
substitute his own living favourite, or some remoter 
personality like Gladstone, or Pitt, or Oliver Cromwell. How 
much of the precious time and the precious strength of such 
men has to Iw spent in beating off the birds of prey whose 
nature it fs topeck and hawk at tjie work of the great ? One 
can hardly think of it without weeping. If only we could 
have trusted these men a little more thev would have yet 
been greater iiien ; and they would have done our business 
better though it must he confessed that some of them, 
considering how we made them waste their time,, did our 
business remarkably well. 
I am not arguing against democracy, in which I fervently 
believe, but pleading that it should mend its manners, 
for its own good, by learning to trust its great men. 
.Among the manv impnjvements democracy needs at 'the 
•moment I place tliis first. 1 place it before Electoral Reform 
and everything else. Of course it is a difficult lesson to teach. 
Objectionable as the word is, I feel bound to call it frightfully 
difficult, because as things now are disasters seem to be the only 
means of bringing the lesson home. It was in this way that 
the American j>eople learned to trust .\braham Lincoln — the 
greatest man of modern times. And I cannot help venturing 
the opinion that ever since the time of Lincoln, when they 
learnt the lesson, the Americans have been slightly ahead of 
us in the matter of treating their great men. 
The difliculty of learning the lesson arises, in the first place, 
from the circumstance that public opinion is always sharply 
divided on the question as to. whether any given individual 
is or is not a great man. I cannot think" of any statesman 
prominent at the moment to whom one could give that char- 
acter with a reasonable expectation that everybody would 
agree. I may think for example that Mr. Asquith is a 
great man : but somebody thinks the contrary, makes him 
his target and shoots hiin down. The truth is that our 
instinct for the detection of great men is deplorably 
undeveloped. How to improve it is a large question, being 
connected with our whole manner of life and thought. It is 
much easier to say how the needed improvement is prevented 
from taking place. It is prevented by the atmosphere, manners, 
method, spirit and aims of party government — what I ven- 
tured to call in a previous article "government by debating 
society." In party government the prime object is not to 
get the business done in the best manner and the shortest 
time, but to dish your opponents ; and if that is accomplished 
few persons care a straw about the great men who are sacri- 
ficed in the process. liivery sharp debater who can shoot 
a great mai) down thinks himself to be doing God service 
, and is applauded to the skies for his performance. In 
such an atmosphere the habit of mind which thinks about 
great men, meditates on their \-alue and learns to trust them, 
has no chance of forming itself ; and the instinct for detecting 
great men becomes atrophied in consequence. Of course the 
shooting down tactics of the one party may have the effect 
incidentally, of increasing the devotion of the other party 
.to their chief. But this effect is not altogether good, for 
it leads the party attacked to make their great man into an 
idol, which is the next worse thing to using him as a target. 
Wrong treatment of the great man is thus promoted from 
both sides. I believe that if we could get out of this atmo- 
sphere altogether our instinct for detecting great men, which 
is after all a natural gift, would begin to assert itself, with 
results most beneficial to our public life. 
Another difficulty arises from the intolerable nonsense with 
whiyh some of us are afllicted about the people being "all 
powerful." Just as there are some things which no indi- 
vidual can do, so there are some things which no people can 
,do. No people can conduct the operations of war, and— 
, I would add -of foreign policy, without getting into an 
iintolerable mess of cross purposes, bad temper and lost 
,opi)ort unities. When emergencies arise a great people shows 
,,jts greatness not by trying to handle them itself, which is the 
act of a fool, but by finding the right man to handle them and 
trusting him accordingly. To do that is not to surrender 
democratic principles. It is to jnit them to their highest 
use and exercise. It is the ])roof of a highly educated demo- 
, cracy which has learnt its own limitations aiid has the wisdom 
♦n keep within them. 
