These men, then, have not the least idea of the function they fulfil. No more has the agent of the Insurance Company who corrupts a legislature. The difference in degree between the two iniquities is enormous, because one belongs to that region in the scale of morality which is completely understood, and the other does not. We do not excuse the insurance agent; we will not allow him to plead ignorance. He commits a penal offence. We will not allow selfishness to trade upon selfishness and steal from the public in this form. But what law can protect the public interest in the higher faculties? What statute can enforce artistic truth? We actually forbid a man by statute to sell his vote, because a vote is understood to be an opinion, a thing dependent on rational and moral considerations. You cannot buy and sell it without turning it into something else. The exercise of that infinitesimal fraction of public power represented by one man’s vote is hedged about with penalties; because the logic of practical government has forced us to see its importance. But the harm done to a community by the sale of a vote does not follow by virtue of the statute, but by virtue of a law of influence of which the statute is the recognition. The same law governs the sale of any opinion, whether it be conveyed in a book review or in a political speech, in a picture of life and manners, a poem, a novel, or an etching. There is no department of life in which you can lie for private gain without doing harm. The grosser forms of it give us the key to the subtler ones, and the jail becomes the symbol of that condition into which the violation of truth will shut any mind.