 While every community hopes for the accomplishment of its central cause, and sees that cause’s fulfillment as its highest achievement, Royce placed particularly high emphasis on the phenomenon of loyalty to a lost cause. A lost cause is not in Royce’s view a hopeless cause, but rather one that cannot be fulfilled within the actual lifetime of the community or any of its members. Many lost causes are rightly lost, of course, and there is a problematic aspect to Royce’s use of this term. Royce’s contemporaries would have understood “the lost cause” as a reference to “the mythology of pre-Civil War southern society,” a romanticized view of the Confederate States’ defense of slavery and segregation in the U.S. Civil War (Fischer 2012, 32). Royce identified military action as an example of predatory loyalty, however, so his veiled reference to the lost cause of the Confederacy is a very poor example of loyalty. Besides such misguided “evil causes,” though, there are a number of legitimate causes that are, by this definition, “lost” simply in virtue of their scope and magnitude. Such causes are not hopeless, however. It is precisely these causes that establish ideals capable of evoking our highest hope and moral commitment.