Note (return) — Chapter I

After a time the politician may cease even to desire to reason with his constituents, and may come to regard them as purely irrational creatures of feeling and opinion, and himself as the purely rational 'over-man' who controls them. It is at this point that a resolute and able statesman may become most efficient and most dangerous. Bolingbroke, while he was trying to teach his 'Patriot King' how to govern men by understanding them, spoke in a haunting phrase of 'that staring timid creature man.'[51] A century before Darwin he, like Swift and Plato, was able by sheer intellectual detachment to see his fellow-men as animals. He himself, he thought, was one of those few 'among the societies of men ... who engross almost the whole reason of the species, who are born to instruct, to guide, and to preserve, who are designed to be the tutors and the guardians of human kind.'[52] For the rest, 'Reason has small effect upon numbers: a turn of imagination, often as violent and as sudden as a gust of wind, determines their conduct.'[53]