Wealth & Money Quote by George Bancroft

Bancroft turns “progress” into a power shift, not a parade of inventions. Civilization, in his telling, isn’t measured by monuments or markets but by who gets to rule: wealth and brute force, or the “intelligence of the common mind.” That phrasing is doing heavy political work. “Exact measure” borrows the language of science to make a moral argument sound empirical, as if history itself has a yardstick and democracy is the data-backed outcome.

The subtext is a defense of popular sovereignty at a moment when it was anything but settled. Bancroft wrote in the long shadow of revolutions, rapid industrialization, and the hardening hierarchies of capital. In 19th-century America, the “common mind” was being mythologized even as it was being restricted: property and race narrowed the electorate; slavery made a mockery of any claim that intelligence had “prevailed” over force. The sentence implicitly drafts a flattering national self-portrait while also setting a standard the nation repeatedly failed to meet.

As a historian, Bancroft also smuggles in a theory of history: not cyclical tragedy, not great-man heroics, but a kind of upward struggle where ideas and education slowly discipline violence and money. “Prevailed” matters: it concedes that wealth and force never disappear; they’re merely checked, contained, argued down. The line works because it dignifies ordinary people without romanticizing them as saints. The “common mind” isn’t purity; it’s a collective capacity to reason, organize, and insist that legitimacy comes from persuasion rather than coercion. In an era of robber barons and expansionist warfare, that’s both aspiration and warning.