leadership have secured a virtual, though only a secondary, common purpose.
Now leadership, potent as it undoubtedly is in calling forth the energy of the social instinct, is essentially a limited and therefore an exhaustible force. It depends for continued vigour upon successful enterprise. While it is succeeding there are only wide limits to the moral power it can set free and command, but in the face of misfortune and disaster its limitations become obvious, and its power inevitably declines. On the other hand, the moral power yielded by a true community of feeling, and not imposed by leadership, is enormously more resistant and even indestructible by failure and defeat. History gives many examples of the encounters of communities of these two types—the led society and the homogeneous society—and in spite of the invariably greater size and physical power of the former, frequently records the astoundingly successful resistance its greater moral vigour has given to the latter. This is perhaps why Carthage beat in vain against little Rome, and certainly why Austria failed to subdue Switzerland.
All large societies that have had their day and have fallen from their zenith by internal dissolution or outward attack have been given their impulse to expansion by leadership and have depended on it for their moral power. If society is to continue to depend for its enterprise and expansion upon leadership, and can find no more satisfactory source of moral power, it is, to say the least, highly probable that civilizations will continue to rise and fall in a dreadful sameness of alternating aspiration and despair until perhaps some lucky accident of {248} confusion finds for humanity in extinction the rest it could never win for itself in life.
There is, however, reason to suppose that susceptibility to leadership is a characteristic of relatively primitive social types, and tends to diminish with increasing social complexity. I have already called attention to and attempted to define the apparently specific psychological differences