You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer

Orthodoxy, ch. 7 “The Eternal Revolution” (1908)