Abounding Wickedness

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 25, 1873

Abounding Wickedness.

THE Standard, a Baptist newspaper in Chicago, says—“Whether are we drifting? 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, to an extent 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 tolerated in high places; in short, everything appears to be out of joint. We are either coming to the end of this, by a sweeping and 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.

“Bribery and corruption, beginning at the political fountain-head, are doing their 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—stealing, on a larger or smaller scale. Judges sell their influence, and administrative officers combine to swindle the government to contracts. So we go on until distrust of the honesty of our public servants has crept in everywhere. The haste to be rich, to possess power and place, lie at the bottom of the whole of it.”

It is to be hoped that the result of the investigations at Washington, and elsewhere, will be to arouse and quicken the attention of the country to the dangers which threaten, as they reveal the fact that we have already made a fearful plunge into the maelstrom of corruption, and that we exhibit a decadence in public morals fearful to contemplate.—Signs of Our Times.