Politics & Power Quote by Margaret Fuller

Fuller writes like someone watching a young democracy audition for adulthood and finding the performance a little too eager to please. The sentence opens as a wish - "Would that..". - but it lands as an indictment: honesty is treated as a "maxim", a slogan people can recite without absorbing. By calling it "simple", she needles a culture sophisticated enough to rationalize dishonesty yet somehow incapable of basic moral coherence.

Her real target is the widening gap between what Americans claimed to be (virtuous, self-governing, principled) and how they behaved in the arenas that mattered: politics and trade. Fuller pairs them deliberately. Corruption isn't an isolated vice of backroom politicians; it's a shared ecosystem with commerce, a feedback loop where selling and governing start to use the same tricks. The phrase "elevate the tone" is doing social work: she is critiquing not just laws or outcomes, but the mood, the acceptable register of public life - the casual cynicism that lets people excuse moral compromise as realism.

The subtext is transcendentalist, but impatient. "The true aim of life" isn't pious abstraction; it's a demand that inner cultivation produce outer standards. Her closing ambition - "till public and private honor become identical" - is radical because it denies Americans their favorite loophole: the idea that business is business, politics is politics, and integrity is a private luxury. Fuller insists that character can't be compartmentalized, and that a society built on split selves will eventually make hypocrisy feel like common sense.