see photographs of him nursing his little grand-daughter, we like to know that he plays golf badly, and rides the bicycle like our common selves, we enjoy hearing of “pretty incidents” in which he has given the blind crossing-sweeper a penny or begged a glass of water at a wayside cottage—and there are excellent biological reasons for our gratification. In times of war leadership is not less obviously based on instinct, though naturally, since the herd is exposed to a special series of stresses, manifestations of it are also somewhat special. A people at war feels the need of direction much more intensely than a people at peace, and as always they want some one who appeals to their instinctive feeling of being directed, comparatively regardless of whether he is able in fact to direct. This instinctive feeling inclines them to the choice of a man who presents at any rate the appearance and manners of authority and power rather than to one who possesses the substance of capacity but is denied the shadow. They have their conventional pictures of the desired type—the strong, silent, relentless, the bold, outspoken, hard, and energetic—but at all costs he must be a “man,” a “leader who can lead,” a shepherd, in fact, who, by his gesticulations and {118} his shouts, leaves his flock in no doubt as to his presence and his activity. It is touching to remember how often a people in pursuit of this ideal has obtained and accepted in response to its prayers nothing but melodramatic bombast, impatience, rashness, and foolish, boasting truculence; and to remember how often a great statesman in his country’s need has had to contend not merely with her foreign enemies, but with those at home whose vociferous malignity has declared his magnanimous composure to be sluggishness, his cautious scepticism to be feebleness, and his unostentatious resolution to be stupidity.