In other words, reform is an idea that must be taken up as a whole. You do not want any specific thing. You use every issue as a symbol. Let us give up the hope of finding any simpler way out of it. Let us take up the burden at its heaviest end, and acknowledge that nothing but an increase of personal force in every American can change our politics. It is curious that this course, which is the shortest cut to the millennium, should be met with the reproach that it puts off victory. This is entirely due to a defect in the imagination of people who are dealing with an unfamiliar subject. We have to learn its principles. We know that what we really want is all of virtue; but it seems so unreasonable to claim this, that we try to buy it piecemeal,--item, a schoolhouse, item, four parks; and with each gain comes a sacrifice of principle, disintegration, discouragement. Fools, if you had asked for all, you would have had this and more. We are defeated by compromise because, no matter how much we may deceive ourselves into thinking that good government is an aggregate of laws and parks, it is not true. Good government is the outcome of private virtue, and virtue is one thing,--a unit, a force, a mode of motion. It cannot pass through a non-conductor of casuistry at any point. Compromise is loss: first, because it stops the movement, and kills energy; second, because it encourages the illusion that the wooden schoolhouse is good government. As against this, you have the fact that some hundreds of school children do get housed six months before they would have been housed otherwise. But this is like cashing a draft for a thousand pounds with a dish of oatmeal.