xperience of others. A personality must be
positive to contribute to the solution of difficulties and the
management of enterprises, but it must be receptive in order
to benefit by the ideas of others and cooeperate with them.
To have power and humility at once is sometimes sufficient to
make a leader among men. Humility prevents us from rushing
headlong along the paths of our own dogmatic errors; it
enables us further to deal with other people who would be
simply antagonized by our flat-footed insistence on every
detail of our own initial position. The history of great
statesmanship is in part, at least, the history of wise compromise.
Nor does this mean sordid temporizing and opportunism. As
John Morley puts it:

It is the worst of political blunders to insist on carrying an ideal
set of principles into execution, where others have rights of dissent,
and those others persons whose assent is as indispensable to success
as it is difficult to attain. But to be afraid or ashamed of holding
such an ideal set of principles in one's mind in their highest and most
abstract expression, does more than any other one cause to stunt or
petrify those elements of character to which life should owe most of
its savor.[1]

[Footnote 1: Morley: _On Compromise_, p. 123.]

DOGMATISM AND SELF-ASSERTION. Too often, however, a
person of powerful and distinctive opinions is so moved by
the momentum of his own strong enthusiasms, so fixed by the
habitual definiteness of his own position that he cannot be
swayed. In its worst form this is rampant egoism and dogmatism.
All of us have met the loud-mouthed exponent of his
own opinions, who speaks whatever be the subject, as if _his_
position only were plausible or possible, and as if all who gain-said
him were either fools or knaves.

If we examine the mental furniture of the average man we shall
find it made up of a vast number of judgments of a very precise kind
upon subjects of very great variety, complexity, and difficulty. He
will have fairly settled views upon the origin and nature of the
universe, and upon what he will probably call its meaning; he will have
conclusions as to what is to happen to him at death and after, as to
what is and what should be the basis of conduct. He will know how
the country should be governed, and why it is going to the dogs, why
this piece of legislation is good and that bad. He will have strong
views upon military and naval strategy, the principles of t