igh 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. The forces that tend for evil are great and
terrible, but the forces of truth and love and courage and honesty and
generosity and sympathy are also stronger than ever before. It is a
foolish and timid, no less than a wicked thing, to blink the fact that
the forces of evil are strong, but it is even worse to fail to take into
account the strength of the forces that tell for good. Hysterical
sensationalism is the very poorest weapon wherewith to fight for lasting
righteousness. The men who, with stern sobriety and truth, assail the
many evils of our time, whether in the public press, or in magazines, or
in books, are the leaders and allies of all engaged in the work for
social and political betterment. But if they give good reason for
distrust of what they say, if they chill the ardor of those who demand
truth as a primary virtue, they thereby betray the good cause, and play
into the hands of the very men against whom they are nominally at
war....

At this moment we are passing through a period of great unrest--social,
political, and industrial unrest. It is of the utmost importance for our
future that this should prove to be not the unrest of mere
rebelliousness against life, of mere dissatisfaction with the inevitable
inequality of conditions, but the unrest of a resolute and eager
ambition to secure the betterment of the individual and the nation. So
far as this movement of agitation throughout the country takes the form
of a fierce discontent with evil, of a determination to punish the
authors of evil, whether in industry or politics, the feeling is to be
heartily welcomed as a sign of healthy life.

If, on the other hand, it turns into a mere crusade of appetite against
appetite, of a contest between the brutal greed of the "have-nots" and
the brutal greed of the "haves," then it has no signi