It is very easy to be efficient if the efficiency is based on unscrupulousness, and it is still easier to be virtuous if one is content with the purely negative virtue which consists in not doing anything wrong, but being wholly unable to accomplish anything positive for good.

My favorite quotation from Josh Billings again applies: It is so much easier to be a harmless dove than a wise serpent.

My duty was to combine both idealism and efficiency.

At that time the public conscience was still dormant as regards many species of political and business misconduct, as to which during the next decade it became sensitive.

I had to work with the tools at hand and to take into account the feeling of the people, which I have already described.