The earlier centuries cared little for the life of a man. Hence they failed
to discriminate. In masses and mobs they needed kings and rulers but could
not choose them. Hence the device of selecting as ruler the elder son of
the last ruler, whatever his nature might be. A child, a lunatic, a
monster, a sage,--it was all the same to these unheeding centuries. The
people could not follow those they understood or who understood them. They
must trust all to the blind chance of heredity. Tyrant or figurehead, the
mob, which from its own indifference creates the pomp of royalty, threw up
its caps for the king, and blindly died for him in his courage or in his
folly with the same unquestioning loyalty. In like manner did the mob
fashion lords and princes, each in its own image. Not the man who would do
or think or help, but the eldest son of a former lord was chosen for its
homage. The result of it all was that no use was made of the forces of
nature, for those who might have learned to control them were hunted to
their death. The men who could think and act for themselves were in no
position to give their actions leverage.

When a people really means to do something, it must resort to democracy. It
must value men as men, not as functions of a chain of conventionalities.
"America," says Emerson, "means opportunity;" opportunity for work,
opportunity for training, opportunity for influence. Democracy exalts the
individual. It realizes that of all the treasures of the nation, the talent
of its individual men is the most important. It realizes that its first
duty is to waste none of this. It cannot afford to leave its Miltons mute
and inglorious nor to let its village Hampdens waste their strength on
petty obstacles while it has great tasks for them to accomplish. In a
democracy, when work is to be done men rise to do it. No matter what the
origin of our Washingtons and Lincolns, our Grants and our Shermans, our
Clevelands or our Roosevelts, our Eliots, our Hadleys, or our Remsens, we
know that they are being made ready for every crisis which may need their