EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN

The three things a Tammany leader most dreaded were in the ascending order of repulsiveness, the penitentiary, honest industry, and biography

The locomotive is coming into contact with the framework of our institutions. In this country of simple government, the most powerful civilizing force which civilization has yet produced must … assume its relation to that political machinery which is to control and regulate it.

We underrate their honesty and overrate their intelligence.

The Government must get out of the "protective" business and the "subsidy" business and the "improvement" and the "development" business. It must let trade, and commerce, and manufactures, and steamboats, and railroads and telegraphs alone. It cannot touch them without breeding corruption.

The great obstacle in the way of reform is neither American nor English, it is simply human. All that we know, by past experience, of the attempts of man to provide himself with a government, makes it most unlikely that an effort, repeated every four years, on the part of one hundred millions of people, to elect a single officer as the chief of state, should succeed. It seemed reasonable enough when the Constitution was framed for 3,000,000 people, leading a simple agricultural life. All democracies of which the world has had any experience, have been small … Our desire to create a ‘world Power’ out of the Federal machine is a fiasco, full of shame and disappointment.

We underrate their honesty and overrate their intelligence.

The locomotive is coming into contact with the framework of our institutions. In this country of simple government, the most powerful civilizing force which civilization has yet produced must … assume its relation to that political machinery which is to control and regulate it.

The great obstacle in the way of reform is neither American nor English, it is simply human. All that we know, by past experience, of the attempts of man to provide himself with a government, makes it most unlikely that an effort, repeated every four years, on the part of one hundred millions of people, to elect a single officer as the chief of state, should succeed. It seemed reasonable enough when the Constitution was framed for 3,000,000 people, leading a simple agricultural life. All democracies of which the world has had any experience, have been small … Our desire to create a ‘world Power’ out of the Federal machine is a fiasco, full of shame and disappointment.

The Government must get out of the "protective" business and the "subsidy" business and the "improvement" and the "development" business. It must let trade, and commerce, and manufactures, and steamboats, and railroads and telegraphs alone. It cannot touch them without breeding corruption.

The three things a Tammany leader most dreaded were in the ascending order of repulsiveness, the penitentiary, honest industry, and biography