[From the entry dated “Wednesday, January 30, 1907” in Vol. 2 of the AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN:]
The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet. The human being is a curious and interesting invention. It takes a Cromwell and some thousands of preaching and praying soldiers and parsons ten years to raise the standards of English official and commercial morals to a respectworthy altitude, but it takes only one Charles II a couple of years to pull them down into the mud again. Our standards were fairly high a generation ago, and they had been brought to that grade by some generations of wholesome labor on the part of the nation’s multitudinous teachers; but Jay Gould, all by himself, was able to undermine the structure in half a dozen years; and in thirty years his little band of successors—the Senator Clarks, and their kind—have been able to sodden it with decay from roof to cellar, and render it shaky beyond repair, apparently.