Editorial September 18, 1920 Issue

Leadership

Frederick Dixon

The world has frequently been told, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is perpetually assuring itself, that what it needs is real leadership. So far as the statement goes, it is a truism. The world, that is to say, can stand everything that is real. At the same time before a leader can be born it is necessary that there should be something to lead. Therefore it is a logical conclusion that real leadership demands, as a primary condition, an appreciation of such leadership. The Romans of the fifth century who quarreled among themselves, and lent themselves to every extremity of vice, while the Goths and the Vandals were, so to speak, at their very gates, were, by reason of their own conduct, incapable of appreciating real leadership. They deserved what they got, and what they were predestined to get, at the hands of sensual boys and upstart soldiers. The story of Rome is the story of the whole world. Given a degraded type of public opinion, and leaders of a like type will be called upon to rule over it. The same fountain can never bring forth sweet water and bitter. The people who had Commodus for a Cæsar deserved, precisely, a Honorius.

The simple truth is that the sweet fountain sends forth sweet water alone. In other words, that which is necessary to produce a true leader is national character of a high type. It is character which makes the nation, like the individual, what it is; and leadership is as bound to reflect the character of its following, as the water from a fountain to be sweet or bitter. This is much more exactly true than history, superficially read, might seem to justify. Nations have by no means necessarily found their leaders in their kings: often their leaders have seemed better or worse than themselves. But it took a willingness to worship the "Little Father" to produce a czar, whether he were a Peter, or an Anne, just as the Anglo-Saxon devotion to freedom found its expression in a Washington or a Lincoln.

Now character is bred upon ideals. "The sculptor," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 248 of Science and Health, "turns from the marble to his model in order to perfect his conception. We are all sculptors, working at various forms, moulding and chiseling thought. What is the model before mortal mind?" There is the alpha and omega of the whole business. It is thinking that makes the individual, just as it is the individuals who make the nation. A nation's leaders, therefore, will be evolved out of its thinking. And whether success or whether failure attends the national effort, will depend not so much on the leader as on his followers, in short, on the character of the nation.

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