Without some such nuclei afforded to the many by the few, popular thought is nebulous, and popular will unborn. An exceptional few are essential even to those revolutionary movements which have the destruction of the power of the few for their object. It is impossible for the many to attack one set of superiors, except by submitting themselves to the leadership or dictatorship of another set; and although these last may to a certain extent represent the multitude, it is usually just as true that the multitude represent them. The multitude cannot even unite to influence those exceptional persons to whom is entrusted the official work of government without placing themselves under the influence of another set of exceptional persons; and thus the extremest democracy will be found, if we only look below the surface, to be neither more nor less than an oligarchy disguised. It is, no doubt, true that those who actually govern do in a certain {188} sense derive their power from the many. They do so even in countries where the supreme governor is an autocrat. In countries with a popular constitution they derive their power from the many by an organised and conscious system; but even in the extremest democracies the average men can exercise their power only by constant processes of surrendering it into the hands of exceptional men. They surrender it into the hands of the exceptional men for the simple and enduring reason that, with very few exceptions, which will be examined in another place, it comes into existence only in the very act of surrendering it; and the many accordingly place themselves in the hands of the few because, from the very constitution of human nature, they cannot avoid doing so. We thus see that even in that sphere of political action in which, if anywhere, the many should be independent of the few, the many without the few would have no power at all.