ck there; so the elephants will have no
trouble in making a fresh path, a little higher up the river, or a
little lower down. A wise leader usually does that: he leads the herd to
the river slightly higher up or lower down, and so he makes a slightly
different curve through the jungle. Why? Because if he kept to exactly
the same curve from the jungle to the river every day, the herd would
eat up all the leaves along that path in a few days. So, by changing the
curve a little from time to time, he allows fresh leaves to grow there
meanwhile.

You now understand why the president of the elephant herd must be wise
and clever to do all that I have told you so far. Even among men the
President of a Republic has similar duties to attend to, though in a
different manner: he too has to govern his country in such a manner as
to provide the people with their daily wants, if they obey the laws and
do honest labor.

In the elephant herd everyone has to do honest work, as he has to gather
his own food; and he has also to obey the laws of the herd. I shall now
tell you about that.

_He Must Keep Order in the Herd_

The third duty of the elephant leader is to keep order in the herd. Most
elephants are by nature gentle, docile, and obedient. That is why men
can tame them and make them work; otherwise, if elephants were by nature
fierce and disobedient, men could not train them so perfectly as to
perform at a circus, or carry people in a procession. So even in the
jungle, where the elephants are wild, they usually obey the leader and
keep the laws of the herd.

These laws chiefly concern their daily food and drink. As I have told
you, in their daily search for food the elephants march in a line, one
behind another. A selfish elephant in the middle of the line might want
to stop and eat up _all_ the leaves on a tree near him; and if he did
so, he would block the way for those behind him, and besides, there
would be no leaves on that tree for them to eat when they came to it.

So there is a general rule in the herd that each elephant must take just
a few of the leaves from a tree, and then _move on_; and if instead he
does block the way, the elephants behind him may push him forward and
make him move on.

"But," you may ask, "why can't the other elephants behind him also stop
and eat up all the leaves on the trees near them?"

Because then all the trees on that line of march would be bare of
leaves, and it might take a whole m