The Best and the Good 115 



in the right sense of the word, civic greatness is at 

 an end when civic righteousness is no longer its 

 foundation. 



But, of course, every one knows that a soldier 

 must be more than merely honorable before he is fit 

 to do credit to the country; and just the same thing 

 is true of a statesman. He must have high ideals, 

 and the leader of public opinion in the pulpit, in the 

 press, on the platform, or on the stump must preach 

 high ideals. But the possession or preaching of these 

 high ideals may not only be useless, but a source of 

 positive harm, if unaccompanied by practical good 

 sense, if they do not lead to the effort to get the best 

 possible when the perfect best is not attainable and 

 in this life the perfect best rarely is attainable. 

 Every leader of a great reform has to contend, on 

 the one hand, with the open, avowed enemies of the 

 reform, and, on the other hand, with its extreme ad 

 vocates, who wish the impossible, and who join 

 hands with their extreme opponents to defeat the 

 rational friends of the reform. Of course the typical 

 instance of this kind of conduct was afforded by 

 Wendell Phillips when in 1864 he added his weight, 

 slight though it was, to the copperhead opposition to 

 the re-election of Abraham Lincoln. 



The alliance between Blifil and Black George is 

 world-old. Blifil always acts in the name of moral 

 ity. Often, of course, he is not moral at all. It is 



