New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1881-03-12

to be cultivated as a disease to be overcome
and outgrown. The destructive propensity
and snarling disposition lap over from the
brute and appear to greater or less degree In
the childhood of men. They are the lower in
stincts; the dead selves which philosophers
and builders make stepping-stOnes to higher
things. The number of those who give loose
rein to the passion for fault-fndng is compare
lively small. Most men find out by the time
they reach manhood that the human nose was
made for other uses than to be elevated as
signal of distress, and that the chronic grum-
bier is not so much man of high ideals as
q social nuisance. Your dilettante politicians
and "scratchers" are ordinarily of two classes !:
sour and disappointed old men whom nothing
suits and with whom fault-fnding has become
the ruling passion, and very young men who
have not learned to discriminate justly between
the strength of character which patiently
endures human limitations working with such
tools as are at command, and the restless
weakness which forever sneers at the lmper-
lection of the only instrumentalities at hand.
and wastes itself in practising attitudes OF
longing for the unattainable. The young men
for the most part grow out of 1t. Compare
lively few get finally stranded on the bar OF
perpetual discomfort. For those who do, who
become the chronic grumblers, there is no hope.
They get into newspapers and become pessi-
mists in politics, lamenting the degeneracy
and selGshness of the time, petulantly calling
upon all the world to hold off from its differ
ences and disputes while they issue millennial
prescriptions; or they go into magazines
to demonstrate laboriously that life ID net
worth living or organize lotteries of self-sufii-
cient reformers with revolutionary theories or
ait in lonely state on barrel heads in country
groceries picking the Christian religion to pieces
or declaiming against the village constable's
ignorance of international law.
OF course these people have their uses.
Everything in nature has. These gentlemen
not only afford us an example to be Stunned
Of the effect of giving too loose rein and free
development to the critical prop enSity, but
they furnish amusement by their wise
airs, their self-suficency and cOnceit. For
they arc really very funny when they think
they are wise. They amuse the world when
they invite it to stop its gOings-On and listen
to them. The crowd can only laugh when the
dilettante politicians call them vulgar. There
is fashion in certain small circles of using
the phrase "practical politicians" as term
OF reproach. But they are, after all, the men
who do things. They represent the average
self-gOverning man. And the average
man expects to have his laws made
and executed and his government adj
ministered, not by the superior beings who
tip-toe round the edges of the vulgar crowd
but by men who are in it and of it, and Of
the same class with themselves 1t
is all very pretty to stand off from
the herd of common people wrestling with the
problem Of self-goyern and, because
petty and selfish and other human motives
enter into it, say "This is a mere strife for
Office. and very dscouraginG to those who
think parties should have higher aims" But
it is not Encouraging TO any man who has
the sense and the stuff in him to do a mans
work IN the world with such tools as are
allowed him. 1t is for practical men not to
waste time in dcplOring the existence Of
selishness, but to set themselves to using the
selfish instincts of men for the promotion Of
the general good. The useful men in the world
are those who use the tools they have, not the
dilettante class who refuse to do anything be-
cause the only tools they have to work with
are imperfect.