Love Quote by Benjamin F. Wade

Wade is doing that old Senate trick: calling you weak without ever saying the word. His target isn’t ignorance; it’s the genteel kind of intelligence that prides itself on “good sense” while quietly outsourcing its judgment to the room. The line hinges on “glide” and “current” - a metaphor that turns popular opinion into a river you don’t choose so much as drift into, letting social force do the work. It’s a portrait of conformity as laziness dressed up as prudence.

The sharper move is the moral psychology. Wade doesn’t blame people for being persuaded by arguments; he blames them for being seduced by “influence” and “respectability.” Those aren’t ideas. They’re rewards. He’s naming the soft coercions of public life: the cocktail-party consensus, the newspaper line, the committee room pressure, the promise that if you just go along you’ll be treated as serious. “Motives which tend to seduce the human heart” is almost Puritan in its suspicion of status - a reminder that corruption often arrives as comfort, not cash.

Context matters: Wade, a Radical Republican, spent the Civil War and Reconstruction years fighting both Southern power and Northern moderation. This sentence reads like a pre-emptive strike on the “reasonable” centrists whose caution looked, to him, like complicity. The intent is disciplinary: shame the wavering, steel the committed, and frame dissent not as extremism but as moral adulthood in a capital addicted to being thought respectable.