Or we might call it the beginning of individualism.  He died for the principle of doing what he thought was right before anybody else did it, and whether anybody else did it or not.  The self-will of Jesus was half the New Testament.  He crucified himself, his mother, and a dozen disciples that His own vision for all might be fulfilled.  Socialism itself, what is good in it, would not exist to-day if Jesus, the Christ, had not practised socialism, in the best sense, by being an individualist.

If we are going to get to socialism by giving up individualism, by abolishing heroes, why get to it?

This more glorious self-will is not, of course, of a kind that all men can expect to have.  Most of us have not the vision that equips us, and that gives us the right, to have it.  But we can exact of our leaders that they shall have it—­that they shall see more for us than we can see for ourselves, that they shall hold their vision up before us and let us see it, and let us have the use of it, that they shall be true to us, that they shall be the big brothers of the people.

CHAPTER IX

RULES FOR TELLING A HERO—­WHEN ONE SEES ONE

I have sometimes hoped that the modern world was about to produce at last some man somewhere with a big-hearted, easy powerful mind, who could protect the French Revolution.  What we need most of all just now in our present crisis is some man who could take up the French Revolution without half trying, all the world looking on and wondering softly how he dares to do it, and put it gently but firmly, and once for all, up high somewhere where no one except geniuses, or at least the very tallest-minded people, could ever again get at it.

As it is, hardly a day passes but one sees new little nobodies everywhere all about one reaching up without half thinking to it—­to the French Revolution—­grabbing it calmly, and then using it deliberately before our eyes as a general free-for-all analogy for anything that comes into their heads.  The Syndicalists and Industrial Workers of the World have had the use of it last.  The fact that the French Revolution was French and that it worked fairly well a hundred years ago and with a Louis Sixteenth sort of person, and as a kind of first rough sketch, or draft of just what a revolution might be for once, and what it would have to get over being afterward, as soon as possible, never seems to have occurred to many people.  One sees them rushing about the world trying to get up exact duplicates, little fussy replicas of a revolution, and of a kind of revolution that the real world put quietly away in the attic seventy years ago.  The real world, and all the men in it who are facing real facts to-day, are getting what they want in precisely the opposite of the violent, theatrical French-Revolution way.  The fact that people are quite different now, and that it is more effective and practical to