If I found that this was true, as it might well be, and often is, I would say that Davy McEwen was a traitor to his class. But if I found Davy McEwen going past hills-ful of workmen because he had a larger, fairer vision of what his class is than they had, if it proved to be true that the crowd-man in him was keeping the class-man in place, and holding true his vision for his class, I would say that it was his class that was being a traitor to him; I would say that sooner or later his class would see in some quiet day that it had been a traitor to him and to the world, and a traitor to itself. * * * * * If socialism and individualism cannot work together, and if (like the masculine and feminine in spirit) each cannot make itself the means and the method of fulfilling the other, there is no reason why either of them should be fulfilled. In the meantime, there is a kind of self-will that seems to me, as its shadow comes across my path, like God himself walking on the earth. And I have seen it in the rich and I have seen it in the poor, and in people who were being wrong and in people who were being right. It is like hearing great bells in the dark, singing in the solemn night to so much as hear of a man somewhere, I might go and see, who stands alone. If we want to stand together, let us begin with these men who can stand alone. There is a sense in which Christ died on the cross because He could find at the time no other way of saying this. There is a sense in which the decline of individualism is what he died for. Or we might call it the beginning of individualism. He died for the principle of doing what he thought was right before anybody else did it, and whether anybody else did it or not. The self-will of Jesus was half the New Testament. He crucified himself, his mother, and a dozen disciples that His own vision for all might be fulfilled. Socialism itself, what is good in it, would not exist to-day if Jesus, the Christ, had not practised socialism, in the best sense, by being an individualist. If we are going to get to socialism by giving up individualism, by abolishing heroes, why get to it? This more glorious self-will is not, of course, of a kind that all men can expect to have. Most of us have not the vision that equips us, and that gives us the right, to have it. But we can exact of our leaders that they shall have it--that they shall see more for us than we can see for ourselves, that they shall hold their vision up before us and let us see it, and let us have the use of it, that they shall be true to us, that they shall be the big brothers of the people. CHAPTER IX RULES FOR TELLING A HERO--WHEN ONE SEES ONE