mmunicates
itself to him who is to obey, and helps him do his duty.

In all the provinces of human activity there are chiefs who inspire,
strengthen, magnetize their soldiers: under their direction the troops
do prodigies. With them one feels himself capable of any effort, ready
to go through fire, as the saying has it; and if he goes, it is with
enthusiasm.

* * * * *

But the pride of the exalted is not the only pride; there is also the
pride of the humble--this arrogance of underlings, fit pendant to that
of the great. The root of these two prides is the same. It is not alone
that lofty and imperious being, the man who says, "I am the law," that
provokes insurrection by his very attitude; it is also that pig-headed
subaltern who will not admit that there is anything beyond his
knowledge.

There are really many people who find all superiority irritating. For
them, every piece of advice is an offense, every criticism an
imposition, every order an outrage on their liberty. They would not
know how to submit to rule. To respect anything or anybody would seem to
them a mental aberration. They say to people after their fashion:
"Beyond us there is nothing."

To the family of the proud belong also those difficult and
supersensitive people who in humble life find that their superiors never
do them fitting honor, whom the best and most kindly do not succeed in
satisfying, and who go about their duties with the air of a martyr. At
bottom these disaffected minds have too much misplaced self-respect.
They do not know how to fill their place simply, but complicate their
life and that of others by unreasonable demands and morbid suspicions.

When one takes the trouble to study men at short range, he is surprised
to find that pride has so many lurking-places among those who are by
common consent called the humble. So powerful is this vice, that it
arrives at forming round those who live in the most modest circumstances
a wall which isolates them from their neighbors. There they are,
intrenched, barricaded with their ambitions and their contempts, as
inaccessible as the powerful of earth behind their aristocratic
prejudices. Obscure or illustrious, pride wraps itself in its dark
royalty of enmity to the human race. It is the same in misery and in
high places--solitary and impotent, on guard against everybody,
embroiling everything. And the last word about it is always this: If
there is so much hostilit