Failure seems to be regarded as the one unpardonable crime, success as the all-redeeming virtue, the acquisition of wealth as the single worthy aim of life. The hair-raising revelations of skullduggery and grand-scale thievery merely incite others to surpass by yet bolder outrages and more corrupt combinations.

Adams condemns a moral inversion he sees in modern public life: failure is treated as a stigma beyond forgiveness, while “success”—especially financial success—functions as a universal absolution. In that climate, even spectacular exposures of corruption do not deter wrongdoing; they become perverse incentives, teaching would‑be imitators that audacity pays and that the only real sin is being caught without winning. The passage reads as a critique of Gilded Age capitalism and political-business entanglement, warning that when wealth is made the sole measure of worth, civic virtue erodes and scandal normalizes rather than reforms.