Success Quote by Leland Stanford

Stanford is flattering moral instinct while quietly absolving power. He frames "sentiment" as an almost natural compass: the first feeling is "just and right", and corruption only arrives with the "second selfish thought" that makes a man "trim" - a loaded verb suggesting cowardly compromise, political calculation, and deal-making. Coming from a Gilded Age railroad baron turned politician, that swipe at trimming is rich: few eras were more defined by trimming than an economy built on monopolies, patronage, and a constant renegotiation of public virtue into private advantage.

The gender move does even more work. He casts women as the reliable engine of reform because their sentiment arrives with "the indignation of righteousness". It's praise with a leash: women are elevated as moral accelerants, not as full political actors. In the 19th-century American imagination, that kind of compliment often functioned as a workaround for exclusion - you can't vote, but you can inspire; you don't govern, but you can shame. It dovetails with temperance and moral reform rhetoric of the period, where feminine virtue was invoked to cleanse a public sphere men had dirtied.

The subtext is a neat division of labor that protects the status quo: men may run the machinery of business and politics (even when it requires "trimming"), while women provide the emotional legitimacy that keeps reforms respectable. Stanford isn't just describing human psychology; he's proposing a social technology - harness moral outrage, preferably from those kept at arm's length from actual power, to make reform feel inevitable without threatening the hands on the levers.