Time & Perspective Quote by Gerrit Smith

A politician “confessing” to a habit of blaming others is supposed to read like contrition; Gerrit Smith makes it read like a dare. The line opens with procedural humility (“the first time I have had the floor”), the kind of institutional throat-clearing that signals deference to the chamber. Then he pivots into a startling admission: he “freely imput[es] errors” to his “fellow-men.” That verb is doing heavy work. To impute is not merely to notice mistakes but to assign fault, to name responsibility. Smith is telling his audience that he’s comfortable with moral attribution, even when decorum prefers vaguer language.

The subtext is strategic: he frames forthcoming criticism as a personal “habit,” not a partisan attack. By owning the impulse, he inoculates himself against the predictable countercharge of harshness. If colleagues bristle, he can point back to the self-indictment: I warned you I do this. It’s a preemptive strike disguised as self-awareness.

Context matters because Smith wasn’t a generic officeholder; he was a reform politician in an era when “error” could mean complicity with slavery, not a miscounted vote. In that moral universe, politeness is often a form of collaboration. The sentence also smuggles in an egalitarian premise: “fellow-men” flattens rank. He’s not lecturing inferiors; he’s indicting peers, maybe himself included.

It works because it weaponizes humility to clear space for judgment. Smith asks permission to be blunt, then makes bluntness sound like integrity rather than aggression.