IS IT THE NATIONAL BESETMENT?
By Editor
There are national vices and easily besetting sins common to the mass of particular peoples. For example, the most prominent sin of the Latin people is believed to be unchastity. This country is too young to have acquired settled habits extending over our whole territory; we are still a youthful people in whom many tendencies compete for control; but the most prominent candidate for the national sin is dishonesty and thieving. “Thou shalt not steal” seems to be the troublesome part of the decalogue for a large portion of our people; and the offenses against this commandment seem to be acquiring that semi-tolerant reception which in a more marked way attends unchastity in the Latin nations. This is a tendency only, a tendency to be resisted, resistance to which is one of the important duties of the American pulpit. The present week has furnished a disagreeably long catalogue of defalcations and breaches of trust. The list may be headed with the case of the late treasurer of Dartmouth College, a deficit amounting to perhaps fifty thousand dollars having been long and artfully concealed, and having come to the knowledge of the trustees only after the death of the sinning treasurer. We are, as usual, informed that there is much sympathy for the family of the deceased—much more, we fear, than earnest and outspoken condemnation of the robbery. There follows a “defalcation”—these long, and to the masses, unmeaning words have their moral—by the treasurer of Yates County, New York. The money that is not forthcoming had, it appears, been used up in grain speculations. It is a part of the official code of morals prevailing among us that a public servant may use in his private business such funds as come into his hands from public taxes. And we may add that college and church treasurers are often granted the benefit of the same loose code. Then follows a long list of breaches of trust of all sorts. There are savings banks’ frauds which it chills one’s blood to read. One would think that theft of the dimes of the poor would be reserved for the lower stages of demoralization. A man must have some sense of meanness in such pilfering; but the purses of the poor are not spared. In one of the Western States, a list of defaulting treasurers of counties was recently printed, running up to seventeen in number. State colleges, poor-asylums, town treasuries, and corporations, are robbed almost every week. We in New York are supposed to be in search of a six-million-dollar thief, recently let out of prison by his official keepers. Over in Brooklyn there is a frightful hole in the people’s pocket. A mighty rent in the city purse at Chicago is bothering the brains of the tax-payers. The whisky frauds are reckoned by millions, and men are in prison who had in other days palmed themselves off upon the friendship of the chief magistrate. The Indian is robbed; the cities are robbed; the national government is robbed. There is a startling statement ascribed to official authority that it would cost $75,000 to prepare a list of official defalcations and shortages within the last seven years. There is something staggering in the statement. We have altogether too many well-behaved thieves, thieves in honest clothes, and under Christian professions. The burglar is relatively a gentleman; he works his way into your safe, but does not profane the sanctuary of your confidence and friendship; he steals, but he is too manly to lie and play the hypocrite. Nor are we quite even-handed in that public opinion which is the chief means of earthly reward and punishment. The well-professing thief has a wife and children whose sorrows we deplore. As Lowell sings:— “Their guilt is wrapped in deferential names,
And twenty sympathize for one that blames.”
We have not drawn a dark picture; we have tried to suggest, rather than paint, the awful facts. What are we going to do about it? Our thought is that the public education needs to be attended to. Morals should be given prominence in the education19of the young, prominence in the instruction given by the pulpit and the press. We must also learn how to condemn effectively the dishonest man, how to taboo him with the relentless severity which we visit upon offenders against chastity. Nor is this all; a careful foresight may reduce the amount of our trusts. We are bound to assume that many men cannot resist temptation, and to remove the opportunities of theft as far as possible. Full treasuries; the use of public credit for doubtful purposes; the substitution of the government for private enterprise; lax auditing systems, etc., are all breeders of corruption. One word more, and it is a delicate one. Many men become professing Christians without becoming or being honest. Does not some blame attach to the drift of church teaching? Do we connect religion and honesty as closely and as constantly as we ought? Upon the churches must fall the greater share of the task of resisting this tendency and preventing its passing on into confirmed habit.—The Methodist, Dec. 25, 1875.