In any particular case a man, as we have admitted, may put up a good fight without securing the fruits of victory, and his adventure may end, not merely in defeat, but in self-humiliation.

But if any general tendency exists to shirk, or to back down, or to place the responsibility for personal ineptitude on the public, it means, not that the fight was hopeless, but that the warriors were lacking in the necessary will and ability.
The case of the statesman, the man of letters, the philanthropist, or the reformer does not differ essentially from that of the architect.
They may need for their particular purposes a larger or a smaller popular following, a larger or smaller amount of moral courage, and a more or less peculiar kind of intellectual efficiency; but wherever there is any bridge to be built between their own purposes and standards and those of the public, they must depend chiefly upon their own resources for its construction.

The best that society can do to assist them at present is to establish good schools of preliminary instruction.
For the rest it is the particular business of the exceptional individual to impose himself on the public; and the necessity he is under of creating his own following may prove to be helpful to him as his own exceptional achievements are to his followers.

The fact that he is obliged to make a public instead of finding one ready-made, or instead of being able by the subsidy of a prince to dispense with one--this necessity will in the long run tend to keep his work vital and human.
The danger which every peculiarly able individual specialist runs is that of overestimating the value of his own purpose and achievements, and so of establishing a false and delusive relation between his own world and the larger world of human affairs and interests.

Such a danger cannot be properly checked by the conscious moral and intellectual education of the individual, because when he is filled too full of amiable intentions and ideas, he is by way of attenuating his individual impulse and power.