Wealth & Money Quote by DeWitt Clinton

Clinton builds a moral hierarchy with the brisk certainty of a statesman trying to discipline a young republic’s appetites. “Pleasure,” “wealth,” “power”: he reduces the era’s most visible rewards to stage effects - a “shadow,” “vanity,” a “pageant.” The word choices are doing political work. A shadow can’t be held, vanity can’t satisfy, a pageant dazzles but passes. In other words, the things that drive elections, patronage, and status are not just fleeting; they’re structurally unserious.

Then he flips the cadence: “but knowledge…” and suddenly the sentence blooms. Where the first trio is dismissed in curt metaphors, knowledge gets a ceremonial procession of adjectives: “ecstatic,” “perennial,” “unlimited,” “indefinite.” Clinton isn’t merely praising education; he’s selling a civic technology for stability. Knowledge is the one asset that doesn’t rot, revolt, or require an entourage. It travels, reproduces, compounds. It’s the only form of power that can be justified as non-corrupting because it doesn’t depend on someone else losing.

Context matters: Clinton was a New York politician in the early national period, associated with infrastructural ambition (the Erie Canal) and the belief that progress could be engineered. The quote reads like a brief for public investment and institutional legitimacy: fund schools, libraries, canals, science - not because it’s pious, but because it outlasts the circus of office and the churn of fortune. Subtext: a republic can tolerate the pageantry of power only if it anchors itself in something more durable than personality and money.