Corruption in High Places.
REV. Mr. McAllister in the late Philadelphia National Reform Convention, said:— The dishonesty, the profanity, the drunkenness, the licentiousness, of a large proportion of our public men, are simply notorious. They are the most tangible point of our political malady. They are the outward manifestations, to which we cannot be blind, of a diseased system. It is hard to select a specimen of the rottenness of our political life. A bill presented not long since for payment on the floor of the New York Legislature may serve as an example. The Legislature had appointed an investigating Committee who spent between two and three months in New York City. The sum total of their expenses was $4,334, of this $2,640 were for parlors in the Metropolitan Hotel, about $500 of the balance were for brandy and wine, about the same for cigars, and some two or three hundred for theatrical amusements, leaving only some $300 or $400, apart from the charges for rooms, that by any possibility could have been spent in doing the proper work of such a Committee. It is some satisfaction to know that the bill wasn’t paid out of the public treasury—at least, not directly. Many far worse things than this have been made public. Still it remains true, as the Nation recently said, that no denunciation of the condition of the civil service of the United States, which has ever appeared in print, has come up as a picture of selfishness, greed, fraud, corruption, falsehood and cruelty, to the accounts which are given privately by those who have seen the real workings of the machine. The worst of it is, the people know it all, and yet look on with apathy. They seem to think that our corrupt condition is a necessity of republican government. And so it must be, only each year becoming worse than ever before, until the inevitable crash and ruin come, unless we enact into law the national desire for honest officers of government. We must have a civil service reform that will shut out from positions of trust, the morally unfit as well as the mentally incompetent. And there is no such thorough reform of this kind as that which the amendment in our society will work. We propose to strike at the very root of this alarming evil in our body politic, by having the nation re-organize constitutionally, as the fountain of all its laws, that divine law which declares that “he that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God.” In the same Convention, REV. H. H. George also spoke respecting our national corruption, and the means by which it is proposed to remedy it, as follows:— Again, the fearful corruption threatening to engulf our land cannot be stayed but by the nation’s returning to God. That alarming corruption prevails in the land no one need to be told. The wheels of government are clogged with bribery and political dishonesty. Its baneful influence is felt beyond the sphere of politics. A New York preacher said, recently: “If the condition of this city should spread itself all over the country, the Republic would go to pieces in ninety days.” Says another: “It has come to be that it is easier for the camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an honest man to gain and retain political power.” But wide and deep as this deluge of corruption may be, “the Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea,” and should the Christian people arise in their strength to right the ship of State and anchor it to the throne of God, all would be safe. And, finally, every movement for good that has been inaugurated in this land will be authorized and backed up by the success of this reform. The cause of temperance will succeed when the fountain of law is purified, when law-makers and administrators shall throw their influence and example upon the side of temperance. The desecration of the Sabbath shall be arrested, when the Sabbath shall have proper Constitutional safeguards thrown around it, shall be respected and protected in high places; but never until the Bible be recognized as the supreme law of the land, and President and Congressmen shall be men educated and sworn to observe its precepts, shall we have a Sabbath-keeping land. The Bible shall be kept in our schools, when the Constitution of the land shall explicitly recognize it as supreme law, and guarantee its unrestricted use in all our institutions. At least, then, all friends of the Bible, all lovers of Christianity, and all sympathizers with our Christian institutions, should unite their strength in this national reform as the sublimest movement of the age, and one that is as certain to go forward as the sun to roll on in his majestic course. Nor will it stop with making its impress upon the civil institutions of this land, but onward, and still onward, as with a divine momentum, it shall deepen and widen till those great voices in Heaven shall be heard saying, “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ.”