The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on, the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket.
Reformers try to put the country in order but to no avail.
A difficult question to answer. For the money-changers had privately sold out to the shoemaker. He conferred titles of nobility upon the money-changers, and mounted the republic's throne without firing a shot. This image was often used by other anti-imperialists to describe the situation at the turn of the century, and was also used repeatedly by Twain in stories concerning familial tragedies where the family unit rather than society as a whole faces cataclysmic destruction or transformation. His view of imperial Washington also influenced his interpretations of its movers and shakers.