at least preserve some taste for higher human quality and honor certain
forms of refinement by their enduring traditions. But when democracy is
sovereign, its doubters say, nobility will form a sort of invisible
church, and sincerity and refinement, stripped of honor, precedence, and
favor, will have to vegetate on sufferance in private corners. They will
have no general influence. They will be harmless eccentricities.

Now, who can be absolutely certain that this may not be the career of
democracy? Nothing future is quite secure; states enough have inwardly
rotted; and democracy as a whole may undergo self-poisoning. But, on the
other hand, democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to
admit its failure. Faiths and Utopias are the noblest exercise of human
reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down
fatalistically before the croaker's picture. The best of us are filled
with the contrary vision of a democracy stumbling through every error
till its institutions glow with justice and its customs shine with
beauty. Our better men _shall_ show the way and we _shall_ follow them;
so we are brought round again to the mission of the higher education in
helping us to know the better kind of man whenever we see him.

The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously is
now well known to be the silliest of absurdities. Mankind does nothing
save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and
imitation by the rest of us--these are the sole factors active in human
progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns,
which common people then adopt and follow. _The rivalry of the patterns
is the history of the world_. Our democratic problem thus is statable
in ultra-simple terms: Who are the kind of men from whom our majorities
shall take their cue? Whom shall they treat as rightful leaders? We and
our leaders are the _x_ and the _y_ of the equation here; all other