To state still further my difference with the typical Socialist point of
view, as expressed in the letter from which I have quoted, I am obliged
to confess that I not only believe in having heroes on behalf of crowds,
but in having as a regular method of democracy little crowds of heroes,
or an aristocracy. In other words, I am a democrat. I believe that
crowds can produce, and are bound to produce by a natural crowd-process,
a real aristocracy--an aristocracy which will be truly aristocratic and
noble in spirit and action, and which will express the best ideas in the
best way that a crowd can have.

The main business of a democracy is to find out which these people are
in it and put them where they will represent it. The trouble seems to
have been in democracies so far, that we find out who these people are a
generation too late. The great and rare moments of history have been
those in which we have found out who they were in time, as when we found
in America Abraham Lincoln, an unaristocratic-looking and ungainly man,
and saw suddenly that he was the first gentleman in the United States.

The next great task of democracy is to determine the best means it can
of finding out who its aristocrats are, its all-men, and determining who
they are in time, men who have vision, courage, individuality,
imagination enough to face real things, and to know real people, and to
put real things and real people together.

It is what an aristocracy in a democratic form of government is for, to
furnish imagination to crowds. A real aristocracy is the only
clear-headed, practical means a great nation can have of distributing,
classifying, and digesting and evoking hordes of men and women. People
do not have imagination in hordes, and imagination is latent and
unorganized in masses of people. The crowd problem is the problem of
having leaders who can fertilize the imagination and organize the will
of crowds. Nothing but worship or great desire has ever been able to
focus a crowd, and only the great man, rich and various in his elements,
abounding, great as the crowd is great, can ever hope to do it.

Every man in a crowd knows that he is or is in danger of being a mere
Me-man, or a mere class-man, and he knows that his neighbour is, and he
wishes to be in a world that is saved from his own mere me-ness and his
own mere classness. His hero-worship is his way of worshipping his
larger self. He communes with his possible or completed s