o utterly reckless assaults on their
character and capacity.

At the risk of repetition let me say again that my plea is, not for
immunity to but for the most unsparing exposure of the politician who
betrays his trust, of the big business man who makes or spends his
fortune in illegitimate or corrupt ways. There should be a resolute
effort to hunt every such man out of the position he has disgraced.
Expose the crime, and hunt down the criminal; but remember that even in
the case of crime, if it is attacked in sensational, lurid, and
untruthful fashion, the attack may do more damage to the public mind
than the crime itself. It is because I feel that there should be no
rest in the endless war against the forces of evil that I ask that the
war be conducted with sanity as well as with resolution. The men with
the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but
only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to
the celestial crown above them, to the crown of worthy endeavor. There
are beautiful things above and round about them; and if they gradually
grow to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck, their power of
usefulness is gone. If the whole picture is painted black, there remains
no hue whereby to single out the rascals for distinction from their
fellows. Such painting finally induces a kind of moral color-blindness;
and people affected by it come to the conclusion that no man is really
black, and no man really white, but they are all gray. In other words,
they neither believe in the truth of the attack, nor in the honesty of
the man who is attacked; they grow as suspicious of the accusation as of
the offense; it becomes well-nigh hopeless to stir them either to wrath
against wrong-doing or to enthusiasm for what is right; and such a
mental attitude in the public gives hope to every knave, and is the
despair of honest men.

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-n