From The Autobiography of Mark Twain:
. . . there was a fine phrase, a quite elegant phrase, that was on everybody’s lips, and everybody enjoyed repeating it, day and night, and everywhere, and of enjoying the thrill of it: “The press is the palladium of our liberties.” It was a serious saying, and it was a true saying, but it is long ago dead, and has been tucked safely away in the limbo of oblivion. No one would venture to utter it now except as a sarcasm.
Mr. Guggenheim has lately been chosen United States Senator by a bought legislature in Colorado—which is almost the customary way, now, of electing United States Senators. Mr. Guggenheim has purchased his legislature and paid for it. By his public utterances, it is plain that the general political rottenness has entered into him and saturated him, and he is not aware that he has been guilty of even an indelicacy, let alone a gross crime. In many instances the palladium of our liberties has nothing but compliment for him, and justification.
…
Mr. Guggenheim, in buying what an obsolete phrase called senatorial “honors,” did not buy the entire legislature, but practised the customary economy and bought only enough of it to elect him. This has been resented by some of the unbought; they offered a motion to inquire into the methods by which his election was achieved, but the bought majority not only voted the motion down but actually sponged it from the records.
[1907]
