On a larger scale, the mere want of habitual exposure to danger will often cause a whole population to be charged with greater cowardice than really belongs to them.  Thus, after the coronation of the Chevalier, in the Scottish insurrection of 1745, although the populace of Edinburgh crowded around him, kissing his very garments when he walked abroad, yet scarcely a man could be enlisted, in view of the certainty of an approaching battle with General Cope.  And before this, when the Highlanders were marching on the city, out of a volunteer corps of four hundred raised to meet them, all but forty-five deserted before the gate was passed.[1] Yet there is no reason to doubt that these frightened citizens, after having once stood fire, might have been as brave as the average.  It was a saying in Kansas, that the New England men needed to be shot at once or twice, after which they became the bravest of the brave.

This habitual courage mingles itself, doubtless, with the third species, the magnetic, or transmitted.  No mental philosopher has yet done justice to the wondrous power of leadership, the “art Napoleon.”  The ancients stated it best in their proverb, that an army of stags led by a lion is more formidable than an army of lions led by a stag.  It was for this reason that the Greeks used to send to Sparta, not for soldiers, but for a general.  When Crillon, l’homme sans peur, defended Quilleboeuf with a handful of men against Marshal Villars, the latter represented to him, that it was madness to resist such superiority of numbers, to which the answer was simply,—­“Crillon est dedans, et Villars est dehors.”  The event proved that the hero inside was stronger than the army outside.

Every one knows that there is a certain magnetic power in courage, apart from all physical strength.  In a family of lone women, there is usually some one whose presence is held to confer safety on the house; she may be a delicate invalid, but she is not afraid.  The same quality explains the difference in the demeanor of different companies of men and women, in great emergencies of danger.  Read one narrative of shipwreck, and human nature seems all sublime; read another, and, under circumstances equally desperate, it appears base, selfish, grovelling.  The difference lies simply in the influence of a few leading spirits.  Ordinarily, as is the captain, so are the officers, so are the passengers, so are the sailors.  Bonaparte said, that at the beginning of almost every battle there was a moment when the bravest troops were liable to sudden panic; let the personal control of the general once lead them past that, and the field was half won.