His Corsican mother bore him while she attended her husband in his battles. The offspring was marked for war in his mother's womb. He was preëminently a natural product; and in him we find indomitable will continually concentrated on faculties which yielded the discernments that made him master of men and master of war. No man came under his scrutiny without feeling that he was read to the core. The weaknesses, strengths, vanities, braveries, and ambitions of others were all read, used, and played upon for one man's ends. And from Bismarck back to Cyrus we find all the great ones ruling in the same way--through the discernments that are will-forced from the soul-faculties. But among lesser men, and in everyday life? Here, the same, only in lesser degrees; not with a knowledge of the processes at work, and thus without the conscious direction of effort which would produce more satisfactory results; though often the world is astonished when the extraordinary introspection of some business men enables them to make money in all their dealings. This is not luck. Their amassed wealth is the proof of their life's strain--almost another name for it. And it should be remarked, in passing, that most of the great ones have been deeply religious in their own ways. Jay Gould was deeply religious in his own way, though I am told he wrecked many. So is Bismarck. So were Wellington and Von Moltke--men who guided frightful carnage. We may smile at the religion which wrecks and kills and prays, but we do not remove the combination; and it is probable that the great ones have been too closely conscious of their own sudden discernments to find a gross materialism possible. It was the same with the pagans. Even Bonaparte had an implicit belief in what he called his lucky star. The followers of Buckle claim that man is personally hardly more than a cipher in history, that his name is hardly worth writing in the great scroll. But how is this when the fate of Europe rests, as it may rest at this moment, wholly and solely in the faculties of one man? The instinct of hero-worship is too deep-set to be valueless. And the experiments which do so much to explain the sources of increased human knowledge point to the fact that it is in the man of the hour that the history of the hour is written. One leads; the others follow. Gifted he may be, even before he is born; endowed he may be, by forefathers who were clean; but when the event approaches there is always one who more than others realizes the stress, strain, or peril, and in a mighty effort creates from his own faculties a scheme or plan which others are glad to follow.