But if a man’s efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense, then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to the body politic.  Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are used merely for that man’s own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others.  It speaks ill for the community if the community worships these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly.  It makes no difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown.  It makes no difference whether such a man’s force and ability betray themselves in the career of money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist or popular leader.  If the man works for evil, then the more successful he is the more he should be despised and condemned by all upright and far-seeing men.  To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty.

The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary workaday virtues which make the woman a good housewife and house-mother, which make the man a hard worker, a good husband and father, a good soldier at need, stand at the bottom of character.  But of course many others must be added thereto if a State is to be not only free but great.  Good citizenship is not good citizenship if exhibited only in the home.  There remain the duties of the individual in relation to the State, and these duties are none too easy under the conditions which exist where the effort is made to carry on free government in a complex, industrial civilization.  Perhaps the most important thing the ordinary citizen, and, above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has to remember in political life is that he must not be a sheer doctrinaire.  The closet philosopher, the refined and cultured individual who from his library tells how men ought to be governed under ideal conditions, is of no use in actual governmental work; and the one-sided fanatic, and still more the mob leader, and the insincere man who to achieve power promises what by no possibility can be performed, are not merely useless but noxious.

The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion.  No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize.  The impracticable visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcomings, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better