What I object to in the letter is the Fear in it.

In spite of the fineness and truth of the motive that lies, I know, underneath every line, the letter is baleful, sinister, and weary.

I accuse the letter of being, in a kind of nobly sick way, visionary, unpractical, and socially destructive.

I would heartily agree with the writer of the letter about the quality of many heroes, possibly about most heroes.  I would agree in a large measure that the heroes the crowds choose are the wrong ones.

But there is a great difference between his belief and mine as to our practical working policy in getting the things for crowds that we both want for them.  It seems to me that he does not believe in crowds.  He is filled with fear that they would select the wrong heroes.  He says they must not have heroes, or must be allowed as few as possible.

I believe in crowds, and I believe that the more they have the hero-habit, the more heroes they have to compare and select from, the finer, longer, and truer heroes they will select, the more deeply, truly, and concretely the crowds will think, and the more nobly they will express themselves.

But the great argument for the hero as a social method is that the crowd in a clumsy, wistful way, deep down in its heart, in the long run, loves the beautiful.  Appealing to the crowd’s ideal of the beautiful in conduct, its sense of the heroic, or semi-heroic, is the only practical, hard-headed understanding way of getting out of the crowd, for the crowd, what the crowd wants.

I saw the other day in Boston several thousand schoolboys in the street keeping step.  It was a band that held them together.  A band is a practical thing.

Is it not about time, in our dreary, drab, listless procession of economics, stringing helplessly across the world, that we have a band of music?  What economics needs now is a march.

We have to-day a thousand men who can tell people what to do where we have one who can touch the music, the dance, the hurrah, the cry, the worship in them, and make them want to do something.  The hero is the man who makes people want to do something, and strangely and subtly, all through the blood, while they watch him, he makes them believe they can.

It is socially destructive to throw away the overpowering instinct of human nature which we have called hero-worship.

CHAPTER II

THE CROWD AND THE HERO

But it is not only socially destructive.  It is dumb and helpless for crowds to try to get on without heroes.  Big events and big men are crowd expressions.  Heroes, World Fairs, and Titanic disasters are crowd words, the crowd’s way of seeing and saying things.

Crowds think in great men, or they think in simple, big, broadly drawn events, or words of one syllable, like coal strikes.

A whole world works through to an entirely new idea, the idea that England is not necessarily impregnable, in the Boer war.  And we see England, by way of South Africa, searching her own heart.  The Meat Trust, by raising prices for a few trial weeks, makes half a nation think its way over into vegetarianism or semi-vegetarianism.