Leadership Quote by Robert Dale Owen

The sentence is built like a courtroom brief disguised as compassion. Owen stacks two long if-clauses that recreate the lived experience of political paralysis: too many advisers, too many agendas, a “great measure” looming, and the private terror that any decisive step will become a public mistake. By the time he lands on “what wonder?” he’s already answered it. Of course you hesitated. In a democracy (or any messy coalition), hesitation isn’t a personal failing; it’s the predictable byproduct of governing amid noise.

The rhetoric does a neat trick: it absolves and indicts at once. Owen’s voice offers empathy to a wavering decision-maker, but the phrase “multitude of contending counsel” also reads as a critique of politics as a marketplace of competing pressures. “Shrunk” and “vast responsibility” push the reader toward a moral frame: leadership is not simply choosing, it’s bearing consequence. The fear he names - “lest you should go wrong” - is the most politically toxic fear because it converts power into risk management. Better to do nothing than be blameworthy.

Context matters. Owen, a reform-minded nineteenth-century politician shaped by utopian and abolitionist currents, is speaking from a world where “great measures” were not technocratic tweaks but society-reordering choices. The line works because it anticipates the modern excuse economy: when everyone advises, no one owns the outcome. “What wonder?” is less a consolation than a dare to stop hiding behind process and accept that history doesn’t wait for perfect confidence.