In Democracy Mrs. Lightfoot Lee’s grandiloquent denunciation of Ratcliffe could have applied to a range of American political figures. “I have degraded myself,” the text ran, “by discussing with you the question whether I should marry a man who by his own confession has betrayed the highest trusts that could be placed in him, who has taken money for his votes as a Senator, and who is now in public office by means of successful fraud of his own, when in justice he should be in a State’s prison.” But her real disappointment was in her fellow countrymen, “nine out of ten” of whom “would say I had
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