oarse and repellent vice; and
sometimes they were men of high character, who held ideals of courage
and of service to others, and who looked down and warred against the
shortcomings of swollen wealth, and the effortless, easy lives of those
whose horizon is bounded by a sheltered and timid respectability.
These newspapers, owned and edited by these men, although free from the
repulsive vulgarity of the yellow press, were susceptible to influence
by the privileged interests, and were almost or quite as hostile to
manliness as they were to unrefined vice--and were much more hostile
to it than to the typical shortcomings of wealth and refinement. They
favored Civil Service Reform; they favored copyright laws, and the
removal of the tariff on works of art; they favored all the proper (and
even more strongly all the improper) movements for international peace
and arbitration; in short, they favored all good, and many goody-goody,
measures so long as they did not cut deep into social wrong or make
demands on National and individual virility. They opposed, or were
lukewarm about, efforts to build up the army and the navy, for they were
not sensitive concerning National honor; and, above all, they opposed
every non-milk-and-water effort, however sane, to change our social and
economic system in such a fashion as to substitute the ideal of justice
towards all for the ideal of kindly charity from the favored few to the
possibly grateful many.

Some of the men foremost in the struggle for Civil Service Reform have
taken a position of honorable leadership in the battle for those other
and more vital reforms. But many of them promptly abandoned the field of
effort for decency when the battle took the form, not of a fight against
the petty grafting of small bosses and small politicians--a vitally
necessary battle, be it remembered--but of a fight against the great
intrenched powers of privilege, a fight to secure justice through the
law for ordinary men and women, instead of leaving them to suffer cruel
injustice either because the law failed to protect them or because it
was twisted from its legitimate purposes into a means for oppressing
them.

One of the reasons why the boss so often keeps his hold, especially in
municipal matters, is, or at least has been in the past, because so
many of the men who claim to be reformers have been blind to the need
of working in human fashion for social and industrial betterment. Such
words as "