Daily Inspiration Quote by Frank Moore Colby

Democracy is so starved for competence, Colby implies, that it throws a parade when it manages to elect someone who simply keeps his hands in his own pockets. The line is built like a compliment and delivered like an insult: “intense intellectual efforts” makes voting sound like a graduate seminar, only to reveal the embarrassingly low bar at the end. That snap of anticlimax is the point. Colby isn’t just mocking corrupt mayors; he’s skewering a civic culture that has normalized corruption so thoroughly that basic honesty gets reframed as a heroic achievement.

The subtext is aimed at the voter as much as the politician. “We consider it a triumph” implicates respectable society, the editorial class, the self-congratulating reformers who celebrate incremental cleanliness while leaving the underlying machinery untouched. The suffrage becomes less a tool of popular power than a ritual of absolution: cast the right ballot and feel righteous, even if the system is still built to reward patronage, deals, and low expectations.

Context matters: early 20th-century American cities were synonymous with party machines, graft, and “reform” waves that often swapped one set of elites for another. As an educator, Colby’s bite lands on the civic curriculum itself. If a populace has to strain intellectually to select “a man who merely will not steal,” the failure isn’t only in city hall. It’s in the habits of citizenship that were never taught to demand more than the absence of crime.