It is because the national ideals and sentiments are formed by these leading spirits, and are perpetuated and developed by them, and by them impressed in some degree upon the mass of the people, and because in all national movements their influence predominates, that the judgments and actions, the character and the sentiments, of a nation may be different from, and in the higher nations are superior to those of the average men of the nation. As Fouillée said—“The national character is not always best expressed by the mass, by the vulgar, nor even by the actual majority. There exists a natural _élite_ which, better than all the rest, represents the soul of the entire people, its radical ideas and its most essential tendencies. This is what the politicians too often forget[74].” That is to say, it is what they forget when, as is too often the case in this country, they consider that no movement must be undertaken till the mass of the people demands it. They ignore the fact that leadership is essential to the maintenance of national life at a high level, and, instead of exercising initiative, they wait for it to come from below—wait for a mandate, as they say. The late President Rooseveldt was a fine example of the contrary type of statesmanship. The character of the talents displayed by these exceptionally gifted individuals determines largely the form of the civilisation and, through shaping the social environment, tends to bring the minds of the mass of individuals more or less into harmony with it, giving them something of the same tendencies. The men of genius of certain peoples, more especially peoples of relative racial purity, have excelled in some one direction. Thus the Semites have produced great religious teachers and little else, and have given to the world its three great monotheistic religions. The Tartar race has produced from time to time great soldiers and little else. It has made immense conquests and established dynasties ruling over other peoples. But, as in the case of the Turks, who owe their national existence to a line of great despots of the house of Othman, they make little progress in civilisation and they do not unify the peoples they rule; for they produce ability of no other kind. We see in most of the leading European nations the predominance of certain forms of genius. Modern Italy boasts chiefly men great in religion and art, perhaps owing to the predominance of _Homo Mediterraneus_; Spain in pictorial art and military conquest; England in poetry and administration and science; Germany in music and philosophy. Nevertheless, each of these peoples has produced men of the greatest power in all or several kinds; and this we may connect with the fact that they are all of very mixed racial composition. And we may add that France, the most composite or mixed racially, has produced the greatest variety of genius.