In the American war with Spain modern thought attacked the last pathetic citadel in modern life of polite illusion, of lie-poetry, and in that one little flash of war between the Spain spirit and the American spirit, in our modern world, the nations got their final and conclusive sense of what the Spanish civilization really was, of the old Don Quixote thinking, of the delightful, brave, courtly blindness, of the world’s last stronghold of pomposity, of vague, empty prettiness, of talking grand and shooting crooked.

Japan and Russia fight with guns, but the real fight is not between their guns, but between two great national conceptions of human life.  Like two vast national searchlights we saw them turned on each other, two huge, grim, naked civilizations, and now in an awful light and roar, and now in stately sudden silence, while we all looked on, all breathless and concentrated, we saw them, as on some strange vast stage of the world, all lit up, exposed, penetrated by the minds of men forever.  While they fought before us we saw the last two thousand years flash up once more and fade away, and then the next two thousand years on its slide, with one click before our faces was fastened into place.

Men see great spiritual conceptions or ideals for a world when the great ideals are dramatized, when they stalk out before us, are acted out before our eyes by mighty nations.  Before the stage we sit silently and think and watch the ideals of a world, the souls of the nations struggling together, and as we watch we discover our souls for ourselves, we define our ideals for ourselves.  We make up our minds.  We see what we want.  We begin to live.

I have come to believe that the hero, in the same way, is the common man’s desire and prayer writ large.  It is his way of keeping it refreshed before him so that he sees it, recalls it, suns himself in it, lifts up his life to it, every day.

CHAPTER III

THE CROWD AND THE AVERAGE PERSON

To state still further my difference with the typical Socialist point of view, as expressed in the letter from which I have quoted, I am obliged to confess that I not only believe in having heroes on behalf of crowds, but in having as a regular method of democracy little crowds of heroes, or an aristocracy.  In other words, I am a democrat.  I believe that crowds can produce, and are bound to produce by a natural crowd-process, a real aristocracy—­an aristocracy which will be truly aristocratic and noble in spirit and action, and which will express the best ideas in the best way that a crowd can have.

The main business of a democracy is to find out which these people are in it and put them where they will represent it.  The trouble seems to have been in democracies so far, that we find out who these people are a generation too late.  The great and rare moments of history have been those in which we have found out who they were in time, as when we found in America Abraham Lincoln, an unaristocratic-looking and ungainly man, and saw suddenly that he was the first gentleman in the United States.