So true is it that it has almost become a proverb, should a poor man steal a loaf of bread to keep his famished wife and children from starving, that he will, almost to a certainty, be sent to prison. But let a Fisk steal from the nation, and a Stokes murder; let a Tweed embezzle the commercial metropolis of a continent, and they will be sure to go unwhipped of justice. From all parts of the country, and from all sorts of public officials, legislative, judicial and executive, come up reports of fraud, corruption, defalcation, breaches of trust, robberies of public funds, and other malfeasances, never known in our country in any former period of its history. The evil seems to be general, almost a radical element in official life. Investigation by legislative and congressional committees, and by the courts, are the order of the day. The sacredness of the elective franchise is violated; political rights are ignored; usurpations are recognized and tolerated in high places; in short, everything seems to be out of joint. We are either coming to the end of this by a sweeping, all-pervading moral and political reaction, or we are coming to the end of our liberties and our republican form of government. While we are aware that this country can bear a terrible strain, there is a point beyond which it cannot go and survive, and at the rate of our downward progress for the past ten years in this direction, it would not take long to reach this point. And all this is being done in a free nation, and by representatives of the people, and at a time when every crowned head in Europe is uneasy at the spread of Republican ideas; when political liberty is the watch-word in countries where the divine right of kings to rule was acknowledged only a little while ago. It certainly is mortifying to witness the depths of shame to which so many of our public men have descended. “The forty-second Congress” has just terminated its existence, and the history of the corruption of the men who composed it is before the world. Every pure patriot, every true lover of his country, blushes as he contrasts the record of these men with that of those who formed the government, or who supported it, in its earlier years. A large number of the members have been proved, as clearly as human evidence can prove anything, of accepting stock in a swindling enterprise, and of pocketing the dividends. This stock was given to them outright, or sold for a nominal sum, generally to be paid for by accrued dividends. The object of thus disposing of this stock was to secure their votes and influence, and they were secured. There is but one word which describes such a transaction, and that one word is bribery. It is true it was not in evidence that so much money or so many shares were given for so much influence or so many votes. A shrewder plan was adopted, that of making each man personally interested in carrying out the scheme to make a few men rich at the expense of the country. One would suppose that this nation had been sufficiently humbled in the sight of God, and the angels, and of men, by terrible war which swept over this land only a few years ago, when thousands from the plains and from the mountains marched to the field of carnage, to bleed, to suffer, and to die, because of a great national sin which had reached unto the very heavens. It took us four long years of blood, of treasures poured out, of heavy taxation, of suffering untold, to learn that God rules in the affairs of nations. But, oh, how soon the lesson is forgotten! . . . . Bribery and corruption, beginning at the political fountain-head, are doing their unhallowed work. The individual sells his vote at the polls; the legislator barters his away for a consideration; and the member of Congress or Senator, having expended largely to secure his place, reimburses himself out of the public treasury by becoming the paid agent of some subsidized enterprise, or a party to a Credit Mobilier steal, on a larger or smaller scale. Judges sell their influence; and administrative officers combine to swindle the government in contracts, and the national Congress insults High Heaven by contemptuously breaking God’s Sabbath. So we go, until distrust of the honesty of our public servants has crept in everywhere. Thus the scramble after wealth, the unholy desire to possess power and place, steal away the conscience of the people. If the deterioration of national morals goes on for the next decade as it has during the last, the sickening spectacle shown by the prophet Isaiah will be realized: “The whole head is sick, and the whole heart is faint: from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet, there is nothing but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores.” So long as the question of partisan ascendancy is elevated above the law of God, nothing better can be hoped for. “It is high time for Christian people to carry their Christian principles into civil and political life.”—Golden Censer.