a man of high character in the most efficient way amid a thousand
difficulties. As a lesson in politics I cannot think of anything
more instructive."

Godkin was a great power for good, in spite of the obvious
unpopularity which an incessant critic cannot fail to draw down
upon himself. The most pessimistic of us secretly crave a little
respite when for half an hour we may forget the circumambient and
all-pervading gloom: music, or an entertaining book, or a dear
friend lifts the burden from us. And then comes our
uncompromising pessimist and chides us for our softness and for
letting ourselves be led astray from our pessimism. His jeremiads
are probably justified, and as the historian looks back he finds
that they give the truest statement of the past; for the present
must be very bad, indeed, if it does not discover conditions
still worse in the past from which it has emerged. But Godkin
living could not escape from two sorts of unsympathetic
depreciators: first, the wicked who smarted under his just
scourge, and next, the upright, who tired of unremittent censure,
although they admitted that it was just.

Roosevelt came, quite naturally, to set the doer above the
critic, who, he thought, quickly degenerated into a fault finder
and from that into a common scold. When a man plunges into a
river to save somebody from drowning, if you do not plunge in
yourself, at least do not jeer at him for his method of swimming.
So Roosevelt, who shrank from no bodily or moral risk himself,
held in scorn the "timid good," the " acidly cantankerous," the
peace-at-any-price people, and the entire tribe of those who,
instead of attacking iniquities and abuses, attacked those who