The true work of the Liberal Party in a Liberal age is, with singleness
of purpose and all its might, to lift the people to a fair and full
share of all the best things of this life,—its highest culture,
hopes, aspirations, burdens—as well as its loaves and fishes—and,
setting before them a truly noble ideal of citizenship, to help them
to attain it. Whatever goes beyond that, or beside that, savors of
Jacobinism, for then comes in that jealousy which is the bane of true
democracy. The true democrat has no old scores to pay, covets no
man’s good things, wants nothing for himself which is not open to his
neighbors, will destroy nothing which others value merely because he
doesn’t value it himself, unless it is palpably and incurably unjust
and unrighteous. I need not go on to contrast the Jacobin with him,
beyond saying that the one is before all things constructive, the other
destructive.