While once it was the rank and file that cheered with all the partisan passions at their heights, today it is the party leaders who are cheering themselves; and all by themselves. The mob that is their audience is in one vast universal trance, thinking about something else.
The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.
While the white man keeps the impetus of his own proud, onward march, the dark races will yield and serve, perforce. But let the white man once have a misgiving about his own leadership, and the dark races will at once attack him, to pull him down into the old gulfs.