Usually this will settle itself.  Public men will impress you not only by their deeds, words, and general attitude; but also through a sort of psychic sense within you which illumines and interprets all they say and do, and makes you understand them even better than their spoken words.

This subconscious intelligence which the people come to have of a public man is seldom wrong.

Somehow or other the people know instinctively those who really are unselfishly devoted to the Nation’s interest. In the end they never fail to know the man who is honest.

This instinctive estimate of the qualities of mind and soul of public men will probably select for you the captain to whom you are to give your allegiance.  Be faithful and earnest in your championship of him.  In this way you make your political life personal and human.

You give to the policies in which you believe the warmth and vitality of flesh and blood.  And, best of all, you increase within yourself human sympathies and devotions, and thus make yourself more and more one of the people who in due time, in your turn, it may be your duty to lead, if the qualities of leadership are in you.

This matter of leadership among public men is becoming more and more important, because personality in politics is meaning more every day.  Obeying generally, then, your instinct as to the public men whom you intend to follow, subject your choice to the corrective of cold and careful analysis.

It is probably true that the greatest danger of our future is the peril of classes, and inseparably connected with classes the menace of demagogy.  The last decade has revealed signs that the demagogue, in the modern meaning of that word, is making his appearance in American civic life.

Such men always seize the most attractive “cause” as argument to the people for their support.  They are quite as willing to pose as the especial apostles of righteousness and purity as they are to enact the character of the divinely appointed tribunes of patriotism.  Whatever the political fashion of the day may be, your demagogue will appeal to it.  It makes no difference what methods he finds necessary to use, so that he can achieve the power and consequence which is his only purpose.

If the ruling tendency be for honesty, these men will make that serve their purpose, or commercialism, or expansion, or war, or peace, or what not.  There is no conviction about them.  Sometimes such a man will represent himself as a great conservative.  He does this not because he is conservative (sometimes he does not even know what that word really means), but because he thinks by associating his name with this word he can capture the “solid” elements among the people, business men and the like.

These illustrations can be multiplied without limit.  They are as numerous as the “issues” which can be used to influence the people.  Beware of the demagogue in whatever guise he presents himself.  Look out for the play-actor in politics.  Whether he wear the cloth of the pulpit, the uniform of the soldier, the garment of the reformer, he is always the same at heart, never for the people, always for himself; never for the Nation and the future, always for power and the present.