Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/203

Rh to themselves upon cool reflection.

When the party leader unites to his indomitable will the talent of eloquence, he plays the chief role upon the world's stage. But if he does not possess this gift he stays behind the scenes and as manager, dictates and controls the actions of all the players on the stage, invisible to the public, but the highest authority, the moving spirit of the whole parliamentary comedy. He has eloquent orators then to speak for him, as he has often high but timid and vacillating intellects to think for him.

The means by which the leader of men exercises his power, is the party. What is a political party? In theory it is an union of men who combine their individual energies to attain the realization of their common ideas in regard to the laws and the policy of the Government. In reality there is no great single party, that is, ruling or capable of ruling, by its size and strength, which is founded on the basis of a single platform.

It sometimes happens that small groups are formed consisting of ten or twenty persons at most, attracted by the similarity of their ideas in regard to the affairs of public life. Large parties however, are only called into existence by the influence of private ambition, private self-interest or the power of attraction of some predominant central personality. Men are divided by nature into two classes; one of them can not endure the control of others, hence, as I have noted in the preceding pages, it must become the ruler, according to the present arrangement of things in this world; the other is born to obey, for under the necessity of making decisions and carrying out the dictates of its will, it shrinks from the responsibility of the consequences of its actions, the indispensable adjuncts of liberty and self-government. The first class is naturally in a diminishing minority compared to the other.