The next great task of democracy is to determine the best means it can of finding out who its aristocrats are, its all-men, and determining who they are in time, men who have vision, courage, individuality, imagination enough to face real things, and to know real people, and to put real things and real people together.

It is what an aristocracy in a democratic form of government is for, to furnish imagination to crowds.  A real aristocracy is the only clear-headed, practical means a great nation can have of distributing, classifying, and digesting and evoking hordes of men and women.  People do not have imagination in hordes, and imagination is latent and unorganized in masses of people.  The crowd problem is the problem of having leaders who can fertilize the imagination and organize the will of crowds.  Nothing but worship or great desire has ever been able to focus a crowd, and only the great man, rich and various in his elements, abounding, great as the crowd is great, can ever hope to do it.

Every man in a crowd knows that he is or is in danger of being a mere Me-man, or a mere class-man, and he knows that his neighbour is, and he wishes to be in a world that is saved from his own mere me-ness and his own mere classness.  His hero-worship is his way of worshipping his larger self.  He communes with his possible or completed self, his self of the best moments in the official great man or crowd man.

The average man in a crowd does not want to be an average man, and the last thing he wants is to have an average man to represent him.  He wants a man to represent him as he would like to be.

He cannot express himself—­his best self, in the State, to all the others in the State, without a lifted-up man or crowd man to do it.

It is as if he said—­as if the average man said, “I want a certain sort of world, I want to be able to point to a man, to a particular man, and say, as I look at him and ask others to look at him, ’This is the sort of world I want.’”

Then everybody knows.

The great world that lies in all men’s hearts is expressed in miniature, in the great man.

Crowds speak in heroes.

* * * * *

I have often heard Socialists wondering among themselves why a movement that had so many fine insights and so many noble motives behind it had produced so few artists.

It has seemed to me that it might be because Socialists as a class, speaking roughly, are generalizers.  They do not see vividly and deeply the universal in the particular, the universal in the individual, the national in the local.  They are convinced by counting, and are moved by masses, and are prone to overlook the Spirit of the Little, the immensity of the seed and of the individual.  They are prone to look past the next single thing to be done.  They look past the next single man to be fulfilled.

They feel a bit superior to Individualists for the way they have of seeing the universal in the particular, and of being picturesque and personal.