FORETOKENS OF OUR LORD’S RETURN
By Prof. George W. Rine
VENALITY AND CORRUPTION IN THE POLITICAL WORLD.
A MONTH ago the New York World made bold to affirm that many of the members of the New York Legislature, tho ostensibly sitting to represent their respective constituents, are recognized, not as representatives of the people, but of “special private interests.” Their yearly salary of $1,500 from the public treasury is insignificant in comparison with the sums received from their real employers. The writer avers that a certain senator from Brooklyn has the gas interests in charge; another senator from the Mohawk Valley district represents the insurance companies, and so on. He goes on to say, too, that everybody knows who the “boodling” lawmakers are, yet somehow they compass their election year after year. The editor of the Saturday Evening Post thinks that a chief cause of the prevailing lawlessness is the law itself—statute-books filled with tricky, subtly-worded laws designed to enable lawyers to safeguard criminals of all degrees and kinds in assaults upon order and justice. He asks significantly, “Who is responsible for this?” That is, Who made these laws? His answer is, “The legal profession, the 115,000 lawyers, many of whom pocket the fat fees of the criminal class from trust baron to thug and thief.” The lawyers have a monopoly of the judicial positions; by preponderance of membership they dominate the legislatures; they originate and secure the enactment of every vicious law; they invent every “joker,” dig every legal pitfall, and set every legal trap. “One of the chief activities of some eminent members of the profession is promoting and protecting corporate crimes. Upon the legal profession rest, in a large measure, the responsibility and the shame for the deplorable” degree to which the commission of crime has to-day attained. After saying that it is the duty of every American to do what he can to rectify the social evils of our time, he despairingly asks: “But what can the rest of us do while so many of the sworn and official guardians of the temple of justice are traffickers in injustice, panderers and procurers to the criminal?” Lack of space precludes exhaustive discussion of this phase of my theme. In truth, there is no occasion for extended discussion, for the odiously corrupt status of city politics is notoriously patent to all. Our large cities have long since become the paradise of political spoilsmen and therefore hot-beds of civic rottenness. No other problem so vexes the soul of true patriotism as does that of contriving ways and means of flushing and disinfecting municipal government in America. Every city of 10,000 people or more is politically at the mercy of a “boss” or a “ring” of bosses who govern, or rather, misgovern, “for revenue only.” They make politics a business solely for the loaves and fishes it affords them. The late William M. Evarts asserted that by far the larger part of the enormous debts of our cities represents “a vast aggregate of moneys wasted, embezzled, or misapplied.” As a rule, the dominant spirits in municipal officialdom are rum-sellers, the devotees of the race-tracks, and chronic feeders at the public crib. As I write these lines, the San Francisco papers bring the intelligence that the tax-collector of that city has embezzled $165,000 of the city’s money, and has left, incognito, for parts unknown. Such wholesale stealings have become so common in the cities that they excite little or no interest. Altho San Francisco has spent $250,000 in the last five years for the purpose of putting its electric wires underground, they are still overhead. “Where has the money gone?” suspiciously asks the Chronicle. “It has gone into the pockets of the grafters, of course, and so has all the money which should have been expended on our streets,” answers the Wasp. The Wasp then touchingly inquires: “How long will the people tolerate such a combination of incompetence and dishonesty [in its city government]?” A late number of The Bulletin of the Fidelity and Casualty Company, shows that of the embezzlements and defalcations throughout the country for December, 1903, amounting to $2,072,508, only $7,368, or three-tenths of one per cent. was owing to national or state employees, and that all the rest was taken by employees of public and private institutions in the great cities. In short, it is universally admitted that the tax-payers of each of our large cities are regularly mulcted of millions of dollars every year by those to whom they entrust the conduct of their political affairs. Should the reader desire further to inform himself as to the awful depths of moral obliquity to which American municipal politics has sunk, he should read Mr. Steffen’s recent book, “The Shame of the Cities.” Such reading must convince him that this inadequate portrayal of our urban ignominy contains no exaggeration. Prophecy Meets Its Fulfilment.
The following graphically expressed prophecy (Isa. 33:14, 15), bears prima facie evidence of its being a forecast of specific evils that should glaringly characterize the closing years of time: “The sinners in Zion [in the church] are afraid; fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites. Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with the everlasting burnings? He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from seeing evil; he shall dwell on high.” Ah, how few despise the gain of oppression; how few shake their hands from holding of bribes, in these latter days, the very days, with their distinctive sins and crimes, that the10prophet, in rapt vision, saw and so realistically depicted. It was the love of money and the love of pleasure that, in the days of Noah, steeled the hearts of the people against his divinely-inspired appeals. It was so in the days of Lot; in the days of John the Baptist; and so shall it also be in the days when the Son of Man is revealed. In the time of Noah, government, as well as all things else, was “corrupt.” See Genesis 6. Do not the foregoing facts sweepingly demonstrate the truth that the days of Noah are, in political and social corruption, marvelously paralleled in this our time? “Even so shall it be,” declared the Master. [The next article in this series is, “The Lap of Penury versus the Lap of Luxury.”]