y general tendency exists to shirk, or to
back down, or to place the responsibility for personal ineptitude on the
public, it means, not that the fight was hopeless, but that the warriors
were lacking in the necessary will and ability.

The case of the statesman, the man of letters, the philanthropist, or
the reformer does not differ essentially from that of the architect.
They may need for their particular purposes a larger or a smaller
popular following, a larger or smaller amount of moral courage, and a
more or less peculiar kind of intellectual efficiency; but wherever
there is any bridge to be built between their own purposes and standards
and those of the public, they must depend chiefly upon their own
resources for its construction. The best that society can do to assist
them at present is to establish good schools of preliminary instruction.
For the rest it is the particular business of the exceptional individual
to impose himself on the public; and the necessity he is under of
creating his own following may prove to be helpful to him as his own
exceptional achievements are to his followers. The fact that he is
obliged to make a public instead of finding one ready-made, or instead
of being able by the subsidy of a prince to dispense with one--this
necessity will in the long run tend to keep his work vital and human.
The danger which every peculiarly able individual specialist runs is
that of overestimating the value of his own purpose and achievements,
and so of establishing a false and delusive relation between his own
world and the larger world of human affairs and interests. Such a danger
cannot be properly checked by the conscious moral and intellectual
education of the individual, because when he is filled too full of
amiable intentions and ideas, he is by way of attenuating his individual
impulse and power. But the individual who is forced to create his own
public is forced also to make his own special work attractive to a
public; and when he succeeds in accomplishing this result without
hauling down his personal flag, his work tends to take on a more normal
and human character.

It tends, that is, to be socially as well as individually formative. The
peculiarly competent individual is obliged to accept the
responsibilities of leadership with its privileges and fruits. There is
no escape from the circle by which he finds himself surrounded. He
cannot obtain the opportunities, the authority, and the indepe