The value of some records is enhanced by the fact that, besides the pathological productions of the patient, they contain much information which is volunteered by the person when he is himself again. Some forms of mental disorder show recurrent intervals of disturbance and normality, and during the “clear” interludes the patient is quite competent to furnish autobiographical data. Often the “remissions” in the individual’s condition extend over several years, although they may be momentary. Another form of mental disease is characterized by the fact that the sufferer’s difficulties center about a single system of ideas which, if left untouched by the interviewer, permits him to be dealt with as an ordinary individual. It should be evident from the foregoing that, contrary to popular impression, the histories to be found in institutions for the care of the sick are by no means exclusively confined to pathological subjects or to the merely pathological aspects of the person. Some of the life-histories which are summarized in this monograph come from mental hospitals. Others have been collected from volunteers who were outside mental institutions and who were aware of no serious mental pathology. They have been undertaken on the understanding that our knowledge of human nature in politics would be advanced if “normal” individuals were studied with the same care which is often bestowed on the abnormal. So the book includes persons who are “sick” and persons who are “well.” In the main the material is printed for the first time. There are no retrospective interpretations of historical personages. The chief unity of the study lies in the fact that it is restricted to politically interesting people who have been studied while alive by specialists under conditions of unusual intimacy. The purpose of this venture is not to prove that politicians are “insane.” Indeed, the specifically pathological is of secondary importance to the central problem of exhibiting the developmental profile of different types of public characters. Our job is not to catalogue the symptoms at the expense of the main patterns of the personality. We have not finished when we know that a modern Rousseau suffered from paranoia; that a modern Napoleon has partly atrophied genitalia; that modern Alexanders, Caesars, and Blüchers are alcoholic; that a modern Calvin is plagued by eczema, migraine, and kidney stones; that a modern Bismarck is hysterical; that a modern Lincoln shows depressive pathology; that a modern Robespierre displays a eunuchoid habitus; or that a modern Marat suffers from arthritis, diabetes, and eczema. “Psychopathography” is legitimate and useful, but pathography is not our aim.[3]