The most striking manifestation of their active electric faculty was to be seen only in a few Limanorans, who would have been in the primitive ages leaders of masses either as orators or as warriors. These had such power of eye that they could bend others to their purpose without the utterance of a word. It was not greater genius or nobility of thought or strength of character that made them so much more influential than their fellows, but sheer magnetic force of will. With evil motives or depraved minds, they would have been dangerous to the whole community: as mere war leaders or beasts of prey they would have been exiled; but with beneficent purpose and a deep-ingrained sense of the ultimate aim of their whole civilisation, they were of great power on the side of progress. They were the organisers of the community, the captains of industry. They managed and directed the various services in which all the citizens had to take part so that there should be no superfluous issue of commands, no friction, or even consciousness of direction. They were in complete sympathy with all the people, binding them into a unity of discipline; and their magnetism of will, applied through the eye, served but to stir the love of service and duty to enthusiasm. In an age of semi-savagery, or of revised savagery such as the military ages of Europe were, some of them would have been great conquerors, combining many peoples and vast territories for a few years in order to sate their ambition or love of glory. As it was, the equal development of their other powers and the universal dominance of the moral aim of the race made their wills innocuous. It was the same with the other manifestations of human magnetism, which in defective or half-developed civilisations played so maleficent a part. That power of voice and speech which could sway mobs to evil in such communities was in Limanora the endowment of every citizen. The electric tone quivered and rang in every voice I heard; it was like the sweetest music, drawing the soul to it. The fascination of personality, which so often in Western women, even where they have no beauty or grace, proves the ruin of dozens of men, belonged to both sexes in Limanora and to every citizen. It was a powerful, diffused magnetism ever attracting its opposite without revealing its secret even to its possessor. There was to me something very winsome in most of them, even when saying and doing nothing; and in Thyriel, although my intellect told me she was not what Europeans call beautiful, this became ravishing. Her personal magnetism was overpowering, even when she was silent and stood at a distance, and in rude times of ignorance would have been set down to witchcraft.