the desirable, a longer road.

Undoubtedly the highest function of statesmanship is by degrees to
accommodate the conduct of communities to ethical laws, and to
subordinate the conflicting self-interests of the day to higher and
more permanent concerns. But it is on the understanding, and not
on the sentiment, of a nation that all safe legislation must be based.
Voltaire's saying, that "a consideration of petty circumstances is the
tomb of great things," may be true of individual men, but it certainly
is not true of governments. It is by a multitude of such
considerations, each in itself trifling, but all together weighty, that
the framers of policy can alone divine what is practicable and
therefore wise. The imputation of inconsistency is one to which
every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later
subject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their
opinion. The course of a great statesman resembles that of
navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of
concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men
soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost
imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always aiming at
direct advances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven, and
sometimes bursting open paths of progress and fruitful human
commerce through what seem the eternal barriers of both. It is
loyalty to great ends, even though forced to combine the small and
opposing motives of selfish men to accomplish them; it is the
anchored cling to solid principles of duty and action, which knows
how to swing with the tide, but is never carried away by it,--that we
demand in public men, and not sameness of policy, or a
conscientious persistency in what is impracticable. For the
impracticable, however theoretically enticing, is always politically