It is the clear perception of this circumstance—the subordination of that mass which we commonly designate “the people,” the appeal of a disinherited class, of “the army of workers,” as Lord Morley said, “who make the most painful sacrifices for the continuous nutrition of the social organisation,” which constitutes the decisive factor in shaping the rebel’s mind and course of life. It sometimes happens that a combination of circumstances throws the need of the disinherited into sharp relief, and the ensuing ferment creates the leader _ad hoc_, as it were. The disintegration of the old feudal bonds in England liberated the social discontent which roused John Ball and made him the inspirer of the Peasants’ Revolt. Dr. Lindsay in his _History of the Reformation_ tells us of the existence of an active and wide-spread evangelical piety in Germany long before the Reformation, and it was the sharp contrast between the spiritual hunger of the people and the barren externality and corruption of mediæval ecclesiasticism, at last brought to a head by Tetzel’s peddling of indulgences, that precipitated Luther’s crisis and with it the Reformation. The crisis in the early development of Kansas undoubtedly marked a stage in John Brown’s development. But whether we may be able or not to trace decisive occasions of this kind in the life of the rebel, the common mark of the rebel mind is a passion for the common people. It has been said of Rousseau that “it was because he had seen the wrongs of the poor not from without but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as one of their own company, that he by and by brought such fire to the attack of the old order and changed the blank practice of the older philosophers into a deadly affair of ball and shell.” Similarly Professor Dowden says of Shelley that “it was the sufferings of the industrious poor that especially claimed his sympathy; and he thought of publishing for them a series of popular songs which should inspire them with heart and hope.”[23] Tolstoi, according to Romain Rolland, had for the labouring people a “strange affection, absolutely genuine,” which his repeated disillusionments were powerless to shake. Sometimes, as in the case of Glendower, Mazzini and “nationalist” rebels generally, it is not the case of a disinherited class but of an oppressed nation which shapes the rebel’s course. The great rebel in every case is made by the lure of the disinherited. Footnote 23: Dowden, _Life of Shelley_, p. 437. The “Songs and Poems for the Men of England,” were published in 1819, after Shelley’s death.