Daily Inspiration Quote by Edgar Watson Howe

Civilization, Howe suggests, isn`t built on halos; it`s built on hardware. The line lands like a dry newsroom chuckle, then keeps tightening: plenty of people pass as upright not because they`re morally enlightened, but because the opportunity to do wrong is inconveniently unavailable. Locks don`t just protect property; they manufacture virtue by removing the test.

Howe`s intent is less to sneer at humanity than to puncture a comforting civic myth. In an era when small-town respectability and Gilded Age inequality coexisted, the public loved narratives about character: honest men succeed, dishonest men fail. Howe flips it. He implies that social order is often an engineering problem masquerading as an ethical one. If theft is prevented by circumstance, then the community`s moral scoreboard is suspect, and the badge of "good man" is partly a certificate of limited access.

The subtext is bracingly democratic and quietly cynical. It levels saints and sinners into the same species, governed by incentives, temptation, and risk. It also hints at class: the poor are policed by locks and laws; the wealthy can launder predation as business. "Many a man" spreads the blame broadly, but "saved" is the killer word, implying society congratulates itself for rehabilitations it never actually performed.

As an editor, Howe is doing what editors do at their best: cutting through sentimental prose to expose the machinery underneath. The joke is the scalpel.