with every available resource and weapon. In both cases
these experiments must be indefinitely continued, their lessons candidly
learned, and the succeeding experiments based upon past failures and
achievements. Throughout the whole task of experimental educational
advance the different processes of individual and social amelioration
will be partly opposed, partly supplementary, and partly parallel; but
in so far as any genuine advance is made, the opposition should be less
costly, and cooeperation, if not easier, at least more remunerative.

The peculiar kind of individual self-assertion which has been outlined
in the foregoing sections of this chapter has been adapted, not to
perfect, but to actual moral, social, and intellectual conditions. For
the present Americans must cultivate competent individual independence
somewhat unscrupulously, because their peculiar democratic tradition has
hitherto discouraged and under-valued a genuinely individualistic
practice and ideal. In order to restore the balance, the individual must
emancipate himself at a considerable sacrifice and by somewhat forcible
means; and to a certain extent he must continue those sacrifices
throughout the whole of his career. He must proclaim and, if able, he
must assert his own leadership, but he must be always somewhat on his
guard against his followers. He must always keep in mind that the very
leadership which is the fruit of his mastery and the condition of his
independence is also, considering the nature and disposition of his
average follower, a dangerous temptation; and while he must not for that
reason scorn popular success, he must always conscientiously reckon its
actual cost. And just because a leader cannot wholly trust himself to
his following, so the followers must always keep a sharp lookout lest
their leaders be leading them astray. For the kind of leadership which
we have postulated above is by its very definition and nature liable to
become perverse and distracting.

But just in so far as the work of social and individual amelioration
advances, the condition will be gradually created necessary to completer
mutual confidence between the few exceptional leaders and the many
"plain people." At present the burden of establishing any genuine means
of communication rests very heavily upon the exceptionally able
individual. But after a number of exceptionally able individuals have
imposed their own purposes and standards and created a foll