We may know a real hero by the fact that we always have to keep rediscovering him.  One knows the real hero by the fact that in his relation to people who put him on a pedestal he is always kicking his pedestal away and substituting his vision.

There is something about any real heroism that we see to-day which makes heroes out of the people who see it, A real hero has his back to the people and the crowd looks over his shoulders with him at his work and he feels behind him daily, with joy and strength, thousands of heroes pressing up to take his place.  And he is daily happy with a strange, mighty, impersonal joy in all these other people who could do it, too.  He lives with a great hurrah for the world in his heart.  The hero he worships is the hero he sees in others.  A man like this would feel cramped if he were merely being himself, or if he were being imprisoned by the people in his own glory, or were being cooped up into a hero.

It is in this sense that I have finally come again to believe that hero worship is safe, that in some form as one of the great elemental energies in human nature it must be saved, that it must be regulated and used, that it has an incalculable power which was meant to be turned on to run a nation with.

And I believe that Thomas Jefferson, confronted in this desperate, sublime 1913, with the new socialized spirit of our time, placed face to face at last with a Christian aristocrat or Crowd-Man, would want him saved and emphasized too.

It is because in democracies saviours are being kept by crowds and by millionaires and by machines very largely in the position of hired men, or of ordered about men, that ninety-nine one-hundredths of the saving or of the man-inventing and man-freeing in crowds, is not being attended to.

I have wanted to suggest in this book that the moment the Saviours in any nation will organize quietly and save themselves first, the less difficult thing (with men to attend to it) like saving the rest of us, will be a mere matter of detail.

The only thing that stands in the way is the Thomas Jefferson bug-a-boo.  People seem to have a kind of left-over fear that the moment these saviours or experts or inventors or heroes, call them what you will, get the chance that they have been working to get to save us, they will not want to use it.

It does not seem to me that anything will be allowed to interfere with it—­with their saving us, or making detailed arrangements for our saving ourselves.

Being a great man (if as democracies seem to think being a great man is a disease) is at least a self-limiting disease.  Inventors when they get their first chance are going to save us, because they could not endure living with us unless we were saved.

Inventors could not enjoy inventing—­inventing their greater, more noble inventions, until they had attended to a little rudimentary thing in the world like having people half alive on it to live with and to invent for.