ABSTRACT
The apathy of the masses and their need for guidance has as its counterpart in the leaders a natural greed for power. The average leader of the working-class parties is morally not lower, but on the whole higher, in quality than the average leaders of the other parties. In many cases the leader, at first no more than a single molecule of the mass, has become detached from this involuntarily, without asking whither his instinctive action was leading him, without any personal motive whatever. Those leaders, again, who are refugees from the bourgeoisie, are used up after having devoted a few years to the service of the Socialist Party. Thus it has come to pass that many of the leaders are inwardly estranged from the essential content of socialism. In Italy, during the period of persecutions, all scientific investigators bore striking witness to the high moral qualities of the socialist leaders.
