There is a phrase which has grown so common in the world’s mouth that it has come to seem to have sense and meaning — the sense and meaning implied when it is used — that is, the phrase which refers to this or that or the other nation as possibly being ‘capable of self-government’; and the implied sense of it is, that there has been a nation somewhere, sometime or other which wasn’t capable of it — wasn’t as able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or would be to govern it. Mark Twain
(Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

There is a phrase which has grown so common in the world’s mouth that it has come to seem to have sense and meaning — the sense and meaning implied when it is used — that is, the phrase which refers to this or that or the other nation as possibly being ‘capable of self-government’; and the implied sense of it is, that there has been a nation somewhere, sometime or other which wasn’t capable of it — wasn’t as able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or would be to govern it. Mark Twain
(Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court