European Opinion of American Morality.
Correspondence of the Cincinnati Gazette. LONDON, January 11, 1872. Another opinion which is just now freely expressed concerning us in Europe is that of our national immorality. The New York scandal overspread the Republic like a dark and baleful cloud, and now the murder of Fisk, fitting end to such a career, has heightened the interest and deepened the concern which prevails with reference to the moral aspects of American society. “In the great cities of the United States,” we are told, “the web of human life is woven in colors so glaring and diversified as to strike with painful effect on eyes accustomed to the more subdued tints and graduated shades of European existence.” Nowhere is luxury more boasted of or believed in. “The thin crust of epicurean wantonness and florid prosperity covers a chaos of bad passions, lawlessness, and restless vice, which now and then breaks through to startle the world from its stupor.” Only in the city where the Tammany ring so long ruled with unresisted sway was such a career as that of Fisk possible—“a career so marvelous in its successful defiance of law, and order, and honor, that although in this country it is not only impossible, but inconceivable, it deserves to be estimated as a diseased product of modern civilization.” Our papers bristle daily with telegrams and paragraphs illustrative of our bankruptcy in morals and our decadence in virtue and sobriety. The marriage of Minister Sickles, at Madrid, is the text of a sermon on his unsavory antecedents, rewarded by his being made a representative of his country at a foreign court. The dishonesty of a member of the Chicago Relief Committee leads to the inquiry whether any official in America can be depended on for common honesty. Telegrams from America read thus:— PHILADELPHIA, Sunday Night. This afternoon, in New York, James Fisk, of Erie fame, was assassinated in the corridor of the Grand Central Hotel. Edward Stokes, who opposed Fisk in the Mansfield case, and superseded him in that lady’s affections, fired three pistol shots at Fisk, one of which inflicted a mortal wound in the abdomen. Fisk died to-day. A party riot in the Louisiana Legislature has resulted in the violent death of one of the members, who was endeavoring to prevent another’s arrest by his opponents. Another regiment has been ordered to this city. In the present, or rather the now subsiding discussion of the question of Republicanism vs. Monarchy, the public scandals which fill the American papers are made the most of, I can assure you, with prodigious effect. “What would we gain,” says one Conservative, “in two important particulars—the burden of taxation and the honesty of public men? As to the first, the New York Taxation Commissioners are quoted as saying, ‘There is a larger per capita taxation in America than any modern nation has ever before been subjected to in time of peace.’ As to the honesty of public men, look at the recent revelations in New York, in the Pension Bureau, in the Indian Department, in the custom-houses, etc., and look at this resolution, passed at a meeting at Boston, ‘that the recent developments in the municipal affairs in New York have demonstrated that the republican form of government is a failure.’” A Virginia paper is brought upon the stand to testify that “the North is ripe for military government. Its capitalists feel insecure, and will welcome any change which will secure their pockets. If Grant could raise an army of 200,000, he could reign for life.” In an adjoining column, and immediately alongside of this, we have Mrs. Woodhull on the platform, proclaiming herself ready to love and unlove any man, at any time and for any time that suits her, followed by a “shudder over the future of American society.” Curiously enough, here come, all in a batch, beside the Miaowar republic of France dripping with putrescence, a defalcation by a high official of the Swiss Republic, another by the President of the Republic of Liberia, a civil war in the Mexican Republic, ditto, as always, in the republics of South America, and all the huge pile of blacknesses and darknesses from our great and model Republic. American defalcations, frauds, venalities, vices, and licentious audacities, are served up in the most palatable sauce in the way of monarchical English. We hear of committees in Chicago to see whether the drunkenness of the firemen was not the cause of the fire, and to see whether the English funds had not gone to the wrong “sufferers,” and committees in the Senate to detect frauds in the Revenue Department , and committees in the House to uncover the defalcations in the Treasury Department, and committees in South Carolina to look up the overissue of bonds by the State government. North Carolina and Arkansas are quoted as similarly deficient in honesty and sorrow over the deficiency. The Ku Klux deviltries alternate among the American items with the “frenzy of delight of Yankee Democrats over the younger son of a mighty autocrat.” A drunken speech of the Governor of Virginia follows a tit-bit from Massachusetts, where “a number of daring burglaries were traced to a member of a school committee, who held other offices of trust.” The homicides in the United States for 1872 are quoted from American papers at 2,060, as a side remark to the tragedies at Los Angeles and the tragedy of the Westfield ferry-boat explosion, for which Jacob Vanderbilt was incarcerated in the Tombs. Now you must remember that all these items, with a multitude more of the same sort, are taken from American papers. I leave you to imagine, for I can give you no idea of their effect upon the estimation in which we are held in Europe. The estimation was never lower. In a word, all our officials are believed here to be utterly venal, and everybody here has made up his mind that our love of money has ruined us, and that we are going straight to the devil.