ly help the result. The inference is that intelligent art
can be introduced here as elsewhere, but that it is necessary to
understand the mores and to be able to discern the elements in them,
just as it is always necessary for good art to understand the facts of
nature with which it will have to deal. It belongs to the work of
publicists and statesmen to gauge the forces in the mores and to
perceive their tendencies. The great men of a great epoch are those who
have understood new currents in the mores. The great reformers of the
sixteenth century, the great leaders of modern revolutions, were, as we
can easily see, produced out of a protest or revulsion which had long
been forming under and within the existing system. The leaders are such
because they voice the convictions which have become established and
because they propose measures which will realize interests of which the
society has become conscious. A hero is not needed. Often a mediocre,
commonplace man suffices to give the critical turn to thought or
interest. "A Gian Angelo Medici, agreeable, diplomatic, benevolent, and
pleasure-loving, sufficed to initiate a series of events which kept the
occidental races in perturbation through two centuries."[163] Great
crises come when great new forces are at work changing fundamental
conditions, while powerful institutions and traditions still hold old
systems intact. The fifteenth century was such a period. It is in such
crises that great men find their opportunity. The man and the age react
on each other. The measures of policy which are adopted and upon which
energy is expended become components in the evolution. The evolution,
although it has the character of a nature process, always must issue by
and through men whose passions, follies, and wills are a part of it but
are also always dominated by it. The interaction defies our analysis,
but it does not discourage our reason and conscience from their play on
the situation, if we are content to know that their function must be
humble. Stoll boldly declares that if one of us had been a judge in the
times of the witch trials he would have reasoned as the witch judges
did, and would have tortured like them.[164] If that is so, then it
behooves us by education and will, with intelligent purpose, to
criticise and judge even the most established ways of our time, and to
put courage and labor into resistance to the current mores where we
judge them wrong. It would be a mighty