He builds the State who to that task Brings strong, clean hands, and purpose pure; Who wears not virtue as a mask; He builds the State that shall endure The State wherein each loyal son Holds as a birthright from true sires From Builders of the State. RICHARD WATSON GILDER. Builders of the State IT is not difficult to be virtuous in a cloistered IT Negative Difficult and negative way. Neither is it difficult Virtue not to succeed, after a fashion, in active life, if one is content to disregard the considerations which bind honorable and upright men. But it is by no means easy to combine honesty and efficiency; and yet it is absolutely necessary, in order to do any work really worth doing. It is not hard, while sitting in one's study, to devise admirable plans for the betterment of politics and of social conditions; but in practice it too often proves very hard to make any such plan work at all, no matter how imperfectly. Yet the effort must continually be made, under penalty of constant retrogression in our political life.-American Ideals. In the same way that we are the better for the deeds of our mighty men who have served the nation well, so we are the worse The Bad and the Good The Bad and the Good for the deeds and the words of those who have striven to bring evil on the land.-Ibid. The Glory from We inherit from Lincoln and from the might of Lincoln's generation not merely the freedom of those who once were slaves; for we inherit also the fact of the freeing of them, we inherit the glory and the honor and the wonder of the deed that was done, no less than the actual results of the deed when done. The bells that rang at the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation still ring in Whittier's ode; and as men think over the real nature of the triumph then scored for humankind their hearts shall ever throb as they cannot over the greatest industrial success or over any victory won at a less cost than ours.-Ibid. The Baleful ness of difference Hard, brutal indifference to the right, and an equally brutal shortsightedness as to the Brutal In- inevitable results of corruption and injustice, are baleful beyond measure; and yet they are characteristic of a great many Americans who think themselves perfectly respectable, and who are considered thriving, prosperous men by their easy-going fellow-citizens. No man works such incalculable woe to a free country as he who teaches young men that one of the paths to glory, renown, and temporal success lies along the line of armed resistance to the Government, of its attempted overthrow.-Ibid. Workers of Incalculable Woe The people that do harm in the end are not the wrong-doers whom all execrate; they are the men who do not do quite as much wrong, but who are applauded instead of being execrated.—Ibid. Harm of the "Respectable" Wrong doer the worst foes of America are the foes to that orderly liberty without which our Republic must speedily perish. The reckless labor agitator who arouses the mob to riot and bloodshed is in the last analysis the most dangerous of the working-man's enemies. This man is a real peril; and so is his sympathizer, the legislator, who to catch votes denounces the judiciary and the military because they put down mobs.—Ibid. Reckless Agitation a Real Peril The The man who is content to let politics go from bad to worse, jesting at the corruption Danger of of politicians, the man who is content to see Shirking The Shirking the maladministration of justice without an Danger of immediate and resolute effort to reform it, is shirking his duty and is preparing the way for infinite woe in the future.-Ibid. Such Men Would Wreck the Republic Every true American, every man who as Altgeld thinks, and who if the occasion comes is ready to act, may do well to ponder upon the evil wrought by the lawlessness of the disorderly classes when once they are able to elect their own chiefs to power. If the Government generally got into the hands of men such as Altgeld, the Republic would go to pieces in a year; and it would be right that it should go to pieces, for the election of such men shows that the people electing them are unfit to be entrusted with self-government. We Must not be Blind Ibid. We Americans have, on the whole, a right to be optimists; but it is mere folly to blind Optimists ourselves to the fact that there are some black clouds on the horizon of our future. Free Ibid. No Populist who wishes a currency based on corn and cotton stands in more urgent need of applied common sense than does the |