ntenance and acceptable leadership,
follow them; but if you cannot, organize separately and dispense with
them. There are only two sorts of men worth associating with when
something is to be done. Those are young men and men who never grow old.
Now, if you find men who have grown old, about whom the crust has
hardened, whose hinges are stiff, whose minds always have their eye over
the shoulder thinking of things as they _were_ done, do not have
anything to do with them. It would not be Christian to exclude them from
your organization, but merely use them to pad the roll. If you can find
older men who will lead you acceptably and keep you in countenance, I am
bound as an older man to advise you to follow them. But suit yourselves.
Do not follow people that stand still. Just remind them that this is not
a statical proposition; it is a movement, and if they cannot get a move
on them they are not serviceable.

Life, gentlemen--the life of society, the life of the world--has
constantly to be fed from the bottom. It has to be fed by those great
sources of strength which are constantly rising in new generations. Red
blood has to be pumped into it. New fiber has to be supplied. That is
the reason I have always said that I believed in popular institutions.
If you can guess beforehand whom your rulers are going to be, you can
guess with a very great certainty that most of them will not be fit to
rule. The beauty of popular institutions is that you do not know where
the man is going to come from, and you do not care so he is the right
man. You do not know whether he will come from the avenue or from the
alley. You do not know whether he will come from the city or the farm.
You do not know whether you will ever have heard that name before or
not. Therefore you do not limit at any point your supply of new
strength. You do not say it has got to come through the blood of a
particular family or through the processes of a particular training, or
by anything except the native impulse and genius of the man himself. The
humblest hovel, therefore, may produce you your greatest man. A very
humble hovel did produce you one of your greatest men. That is the
process of life, this constant surging up of the new strength of
unnamed, unrecognized, uncatalogued men who are just getting into the
running, who are just coming up from the masses of the unrecognized
multitude. You do not know when you will see above the level masses of
the crowd some gr