Among Reformers 55 



humbly, in the footsteps of those who worked for 

 and secured practical results in the days of Wash 

 ington, and again in the days of Lincoln, who de 

 nounces them as time-servers and compromisers, is, 

 of course, an ally of corruption. But, after all, he 

 can generally be disregarded, whereas the real and 

 dangerous foe is the corrupt politician, whom we 

 can not afford to disregard. When one of these 

 professional impracticables denounces the attitude 

 of decent men as "a hodge-podge of the ideal and the 

 practicable/' he is amusingly unaware that he is 

 writing his own condemnation, showing his own 

 inability to do good work or to appreciate good 

 work. The Constitutional Convention over which 

 Washington presided, and which made us a nation, 

 represented precisely and exactly this "hodge 

 podge," and was frantically denounced in its day 

 by the men of the impracticable type. Lincoln's 

 career throughout the Civil War was such a "hodge 

 podge," and was in its turn denounced in exactly 

 the same way. Lincoln disregarded the jibes of 

 these men, who did their puny best to hurt the great 

 cause for which he battled ; and they never, by their 

 pin-pricks, succeeded in diverting him from the 

 real foe. The fanatical antislavery people wished to 

 hurry him into unwise, extreme, and premature 

 action, and denounced him as compromising with the 

 forces of evil, as being a practical politician which 



