Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of our "flush times." The saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the gambling dens, the brothels and the jails - unfailing signs of high prosperity in a mining region - in any region for that matter. Is it not so? A crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty. Still there is one other sign; it comes last, but when it does come it established beyond cavil that the "flush times" are at the flood. This is the birth of the "literary" paper.
- Mark Twain, Roughing It, p.798 in The Innocents Abroad & Roughing It
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