in the form of moral ideas, and it is obvious that ideas only operate
upon the popular mind through will and character, and must be dramatized
before they reach the mass of men, even as the biography of the saints
have been after all "the main guide to the stumbling feet of thousands
of Christians to whom the Credo has been but mysterious words."

Ethics as well as political opinions may be discussed and disseminated
among the sophisticated by lectures and printed pages, but to the common
people they can only come through example--through a personality which
seizes the popular imagination. The advantage of an unsophisticated
neighborhood is, that the inhabitants do not keep their ideas as
treasures--they are untouched by the notion of accumulating them, as
they might knowledge or money, and they frankly act upon those they
have. The personal example promptly rouses to emulation. In a
neighborhood where political standards are plastic and undeveloped, and
where there has been little previous experience in self-government, the
office-holder himself sets the standard, and the ideas that cluster
around him exercise a specific and permanent influence upon the
political morality of his constituents.

Nothing is more certain than that the quality which a heterogeneous
population, living in one of the less sophisticated wards, most admires
is the quality of simple goodness; that the man who attracts them is the
one whom they believe to be a good man. We all know that children long
"to be good" with an intensity which they give to no other ambition. We
can all remember that the earliest strivings of our childhood were in
this direction, and that we venerated grown people because they had
attained perfection.

Primitive people, such as the South Italian peasants, are still in this