Page:The Hero in History.djvu/122

122 the tensions straining toward release betrayed the perspectives of a small-town politician.

There are situations in the world no hero can master. They break with such fury that neither the potentially event-making man nor his pedestrian camp-follower can withstand it, although they may ride them out differently. These situations are commonly found at the end of prolonged periods of distress and oppression, as in the great revolutionary upheavals. They are also found when two powerful nations are so organized that one or both cannot feel safe so long as the main trade routes, the markets reached by them, and the sources of raw materials and supply are straddled by the other—conditions antecedent to many wars from the days when Rome faced Carthage to the days when Imperial Germany challenged British sea power and Japan strove for the hegemony of the entire Pacific. In general, whenever opposing sets of interests are conceived in an absolute way so that the fulfilment of one set demands the liquidation of the other, without compromise or pity or reference to other interests that are common, we have the makings of social catastrophes. They burst on society with the elemental force of natural phenomena and overwhelm alike the just and the unjust, the wise and the foolish.

But there are other situations in which a gifted man of good or evil genius can so profoundly affect men and events that he becomes an event-making man. That there are such situations and such men is something difficult to establish. In the next chapter we shall examine a great historical event as a crucial test of the theoretical position already sketched. We will show that there has been at least one event-making man in our time who has redetermined the course of history and, in so doing, has influenced the life of the great majority of men, women, and children on the face of the globe.

Before proceeding to the evidence that there has been at least one event-making man in our own times, something should be said about the role of women in history. So far we have been discussing in the main eventful and event-making men in history. What of the position of women? Does history show any disputably eventful or event-making women? They are always around, but to what extent do they count in determining the world’s affairs?