Page:Karl Liebknecht - The Future Belongs to the People - tr. Savel Zimand (1918).djvu/13



philosophy of Karl Liebknecht as revealed in these pages leaves but a narrow ledge for heroes to stand on. To him the significant thing in history is, and has always been, the stirring of the masses of men at the bottom, their unconscious writhings, their awakenings, their conscious struggles and finally their gigantic, fearsome upthrust, which overturns all the little groups of clever men who have lived by holding these masses down. In these conflicts, kings, priests, leaders, heroes count for no more than flags or flying pennants. All great leaders, Cæsar, Mahomet, Luther, Napoleon, are instruments of popular movements, or at best manuscripts upon which the messages of their class and age have been written.

To Liebknecht all that Carlyle has said about heroes is contrary to ideology and inversion of the truth. "As I take it," writes Carlyle, "Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked there. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing and accomplished in the world are properly the outward material result, the prac-