Scarcely any universal trait of rural leadership may be cited. Conservatism, for example, which is supposed to characterize the rural mind, is often not true of particular areas, or at least requires such a stretching of the term as to make it useless. The Iranian large landlord is not conservative in the same way as the American midwest farmer, and so on through many similar comparisons. They may or may not exist in high degree in given localities. What is true of popular attitudes pertains also to rural leadership.
Generalities are easy to make but misleading.
Some of the elements of such an analysis are contained in the paragraphs to follow. Hereditary connections of the rural elite. Hereditary elites springing from urban societies are rare. The most abundant provider of nobility is a feudal system, such as most of Europe possessed in medieval and earlier modern times. A hereditary monarchy itself does not ipso facto signify a nobility extending beyond the monarch's immediate family or person.