To assail the great and admitted evils of our political and industrial
life with such crude and sweeping generalizations as to include decent
men in the general condemnation means the searing of the public
conscience. There results a general attitude either of cynical belief in
and indifference to public corruption or else of a distrustful inability
to discriminate between the good and the bad. Either attitude is fraught
with untold damage to the country as a whole. The fool who has not sense
to discriminate between what is good and what is bad is well-nigh as
dangerous as the man who does discriminate and yet chooses the bad.
There is nothing more distressing to every good patriot, to every good
American, than the hard, scoffing spirit which treats the allegation of
dishonesty in a public man as a cause for laughter. Such laughter is
worse than the crackling of thorns under a pot, for it denotes not
merely the vacant mind, but the heart in which high emotions have been
choked before they could grow to fruition.
There is any amount of good in the world, and there never was a time
when loftier and more disinterested work for the betterment of mankind
was being done than now.
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