You now understand why the president of the elephant herd must be wise and clever to do all that I have told you so far. Even among men the President of a Republic has similar duties to attend to, though in a different manner: he too has to govern his country in such a manner as to provide the people with their daily wants, if they obey the laws and do honest labor. In the elephant herd everyone has to do honest work, as he has to gather his own food; and he has also to obey the laws of the herd. I shall now tell you about that. _He Must Keep Order in the Herd_ The third duty of the elephant leader is to keep order in the herd. Most elephants are by nature gentle, docile, and obedient. That is why men can tame them and make them work; otherwise, if elephants were by nature fierce and disobedient, men could not train them so perfectly as to perform at a circus, or carry people in a procession. So even in the jungle, where the elephants are wild, they usually obey the leader and keep the laws of the herd. These laws chiefly concern their daily food and drink. As I have told you, in their daily search for food the elephants march in a line, one behind another. A selfish elephant in the middle of the line might want to stop and eat up _all_ the leaves on a tree near him; and if he did so, he would block the way for those behind him, and besides, there would be no leaves on that tree for them to eat when they came to it. So there is a general rule in the herd that each elephant must take just a few of the leaves from a tree, and then _move on_; and if instead he does block the way, the elephants behind him may push him forward and make him move on. "But," you may ask, "why can't the other elephants behind him also stop and eat up all the leaves on the trees near them?" Because then all the trees on that line of march would be bare of leaves, and it might take a whole month for fresh leaves to grow there again. But if the herd took only a portion of the leaves from each tree, there would be enough food for them along that path if they happened to visit it again in a few days. In fact, the elephants need make only a few such paths through the jungle, if they eat only part of the leaves at a time along any of the paths. Then they can visit these paths in turn on other days, and always find enough food there--because the fresh leaves constantly growing on the trees would make up for the small portion they had eaten. So you understand how wise the elephants are in having that law in the herd. "But," you may say, "if they were to eat _all_ the leaves on a tree, their path would be a short one; while if they eat only a portion of the leaves, their path would be much longer, as they must nibble from many more trees to satisfy their hunger."