Between regular visits to Bermuda in the early years of the 20th century, Mark Twain found time to dash off a droll letter to the editor of an American newspaper.

He good-naturedly upbraided the newspaperman for having expressed dismay over the collective silence of his readers when confronted with unimpeachable evidence of power’s corrupting influence in a controversial issue of the day.

To bemoan the apparent failure of his readership’s integrity and intelligence, Twain said, was to start with a false premise which could only lead to an equally false conclusion.

“You are proceeding upon the superstition that Moral Courage and a Hankering to Learn the Truth are ingredients in the human being’s makeup,” he said.

“Your premises being wild and foolish, you naturally and properly get wild and foolish results.

“If you will now reform, and in future proceed upon the sane and unchallengeable hypothesis that those two ingredients are on vacation in our race, and have been from the start, you will be able to account for some things which seem to puzzle you now.”

On this occasion, Twain’s well-founded pessimism about the human condition may have spilled over into outright cynicism.

In his day, as is in ours, it was fashionable to suspect that behind almost every public act of heroism, altruism or sacrifice there was a personal agenda involving greed, corruption or self-interest.

We find it hard to accept some actions are predicated on a fundamental belief in advancing the dignity of the individual and meeting the demands of justice, not the mercenary demands of self-advancement.

Certainly, selfishness trumps selflessness so often that it’s sometimes hard not to reach Mark Twain’s misanthropic conclusion; certainly we too often see ourselves and our fellow man as slaves to our worst instincts, routinely and resolutely unmoved by the better angels of our nature.

But what Twain called “Moral Courage” translates into resolve — the determination to prevail over circumstances, enemies and usually more than a few fair-weather allies in the pursuit of a righteous objective.

The “Hankering For The Truth” he invoked amounts to an unwillingness to accept the comforting fictions and half-truths we clumsily employ in everyday attempts to try to reconcile the irreconcilable elements of life, to accept the unacceptable, to justify the unjustifiable.

Much as we’d like to deny it, we all fall prey to the routinised thinking, the selective blindness and the willingness to go along to get along which manifests itself as indifference. Such indifference can often be as much a barrier to human progress and humanitarian values as outright hostility or entrenched opposition.

While we can never reckon on our better impulses always predominating, experience proves they will always manifest themselves — no matter how dire or apparently hopeless the prevailing conditions. An individual’s activism in pursuit of a lonely — or even seemingly lost — cause has been known to take on an irresistible momentum of its own, upending even the most long-established inertia, intransigence and passive acceptance and stirring a community’s moribund social conscience.

Even in tiny Bermuda we have witnessed their impact. The impetus to establish clear lines of demarcation between the harsher aspects of our past and a more egalitarian future for the Island came from individuals more interested in advancing the general welfare than their own well-being.

Pathfinders on the road to social and political modernity, two more of these worthies — Sir Edward Richards (1908-1991) and Gladys Morrell (1888-1969) — were this week recognised as Bermudian National Heroes.

Instigating, inspiring and energising movements which helped to dismantle the barricades of institutionalised racism and gender-based inequality, Sir Edward and Ms Morrell were instrumental in transforming Bermuda and Bermudians’ views of themselves in relation to their society, their laws and their political system.

They were both well ahead of their time in mid-20th century Bermuda, a community when it sometimes must have appeared the clock had come to a dead stop in terms of racial and social attitudes.

They both personified the spirit of the poet’s Happy Warrior, animated by an inward light that always brightened their paths, finding comfort in themselves and their causes even when others initially failed to rally to them.

They both demonstrated that virtue and valour can emerge even when history’s tide appears to be at a particularly low ebb, when daring, confidence and optimism are conspicuous by their almost complete absence from the scene.

To slightly misquote a celebrated Twainism, their examples demonstrate that reports of the death of Moral Courage and A Hankering To Learn The Truth were exaggerations.