"True patriotism consists in laying bare everything like public vice, and in calling such things by their right names. The great enemy of the race has made a deep inroad upon us, within the last ten or a dozen years, under cover of a spurious delicacy on the subject of exposing national ills; and it is time that they who have not been afraid to praise, when praise was merited, should not shrink from the office of censuring, when the want of timely warnings may be one cause of the most fatal evils. The great practical defect of institutions like ours, is the circumstance that 'what is everybody's business, is nobody's business;' a neglect that gives to the activity of the rogue a very dangerous ascendancy over the more dilatory correctives of the honest man."

-- From James Fenimore Cooper's Introduction