FORETOKENS OF OUR LORD'S RETURN
By Prof. George W. Rine
VENALITY AND CORRUPTION IN THE POLITICAL WORLD.
TO-DAY, in practically all countries, the body-politic is sick, desperately sick—sick even unto death. It was not cynicism, but despair, that impelled the late Senator Ingalls to exclaim, "The purification of politics is an iridescent dream!" Mr. Ingalls was a friend and champion of clean, honest government, but, like other high-minded patriots, he saw that the prospect of cleaning out the Augean stables of politics was hopelessly remote—so utterly vile had they become. The Hon. James Bryce, the eminent English publicist, recently visited America after an interval of almost a quarter of a century. Being invited by the editor of the New York Independent to contribute to that journal a statement of his impressions regarding the changes, good and bad, that the past twenty-five years had brought about in the United States, he said, among other things: "The most generally diffused and conspicuously rampant mischief seems to be the sacrifice of the public interests for the benefit of private men or groups of men who compass their ends by bribery." This is not a railing accusation, but a cool, honest, judicious statement by one of America's most friendly and sympathetic English admirers. That Mr. Bryce's terrible arraignment is every whit true, is attested by the fact that no one has ventured to deny it. The venality of not only our public officials, but of the electorate generally, is so notoriously in evidence that it has become proverbial the world over. Obviously, the besetting sin, the typical crime, of these first years of the new century, is civic corruption and political debauchery resulting from the insatiable cupidity, which runs so feverishly hot in the blood of this generation. It has been repeatedly asserted by serious thinkers that nine-tenths of our public men are fatally susceptible to the argument of the dollar. The passionate yearning of the American heart is no longer "Give me liberty or give me death," but "Give me gold, and you may take my liberty!" Yes, so incurably sordid have most men become that millions are actually selling not only their liberty, but their manhood, their very souls, for a mess of Mammon. Was there ever a time in the past when the following indictment of a civilized nation could be seriously made without provoking a single denial? It was made by a popular writer on economics and published in a leading magazine, September, 1904. Let us name it— The Sovereignty of the Dollar.
At no time in the history of the United States has the power of dollars been as great as now. Freedom and equity are controlled by dollars. The laws which should preserve and enforce all rights are made and enforced by dollars. It is possible to-day, with dollars, to "steer" the selection of the candidates, of both the great parties, for the highest office in our Republic, . . . so that the people, as a matter of fact, must elect one of the "steered" candidates. It is possible to repeat the operation in the selection of candidates for the executive and legislative conduct and control of every state and municipality in the United States, and with a sufficient number of dollars to "steer" the doings of the law-makers and the law-enforcers of the national, state, and municipal governments of the people, and a sufficient proportion of the court decisions, to make absolute any power created by such direction. It is all, broadly speaking, a matter of dollars to practically accomplish these things. Another Burning Indictment.
Mr. Frederick U. Adams, who is an authority on political and sociological subjects, not long ago delivered himself of the following vitriolic pronouncement on the humiliating status of our official life: Within the past few years the truth has been forced home on us that the officialdom of our townships, villages, cities, counties, states, and of the nation is maggoty with corruption; that our local, state, and national legislatures are openly controlled by mercenary private interests; that the scandals concerning our judiciary can no longer be smothered or concealed; that our citizens are powerless to pass laws demanded by the majority, or to defeat those aimed to despoil the majority; that the burdens of taxation are spurned by those who have amassed wealth by means of unfair and ofttimes purchased legislation, and that the domination of corporations and vested interests is so complete as to be apparent to the dullest of the plundered. This language is not exaggerated. It is impossible to overstate the enormity of the depth to which we have descended in the scale of political morals. Ten years ago any one of the disclosures which now are made from week to week would have aroused the nation; to-day the repetition of these horrors dazes those who attempt to keep track of them. Not one crime in a hundred ever sees the light in printer's ink. The bigger thieves are so buttressed and protected by the fortifications of wealth, and so secure behind the barbed wire entanglements woven by the courts, that their enraged dupes can not reach them. Just before retiring from office, Governor Durbin of Indiana declared: "Statistics of political debauchery in this state for 1904, if it were possible to present them, would be nothing short of stunning." Yet no one who is informed on the questions of the day would for a moment think of placing Indiana ahead of Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Missouri, in political infamy. Venality of Legislatures.
The evidence that practically all our state legislatures are honeycombed with the dry-rot of Graft is overwhelming in magnitude. No one can possibly doubt that this is true who has read the papers contributed to McClure's Magazine, by Mr. Lincoln Steffens, and those writers for Everybody's Magazine, by Mr. Thomas W. Lawson, and the series entitled "Forty Years in the Wilderness," etc., contributed to the Arena, by Mr. Rudolph Blankenburg. Mr. George E. Cole, of the Legislative Voters' League, declares: "Honesty—spelled with a big H and underscored—is the thing most needed to-day in every legislature in the United States. This consideration overtops all others." The vital center of a democracy is its law-making power. Corrupt this and you imperil its life. Senator-elect La Follette, of Wisconsin, alleges that the evil influences employed in this country to subvert government are to-day mainly combined upon the law-making bodies. This is equally true of municipal, state, and national law-makers. He says that the nation has not yet begun to comprehend the real magnitude of this danger to our free institutions. It is menacing the very life of democracy. It is freely admitted by all disinterested persons and deplored by all patriots that, in effect, all our legislatures are in the iron grip of great capitalistic exploiters, whose aim is the control of legislation for their own enrichment by the securing of invaluable franchises for a mere moiety. In this way not only legislatures are debauched, but the people are systematically robbed of untold millions of dollars in public10property. Mr. Steffens and other able writers have adduced incontestable proof—repeatedly—that the legislature of Rhode Island has for years been absolutely dominated by a small coterie of "bosses," who in turn are the henchmen and puppets of powerful and piratical corporations that control all the street railways, electric- and gas-lighting plants, and all other public-service utilities of the state. These autocratic czars of the money tables have so thoroughly entrenched themselves in the politics of Rhode Island—and of many another state—that they virtually dictate the nominees for the state offices; they fill vacancies on the bench; they manipulate municipal administrations; they muzzle the press; as well as determine the personnel of both branches of the legislature. All this they can do by virtue of the omnipotent argument of the dollar. But vulgar plunder is not their only resource. Dr. Newman Smyth boldly affirms that they make and unmake the career of lawyers and other professional men. Through their banks and trust companies they exploit the merchant and the manufacturer; by their generosity to churches, hospitals, and other philanthropic enterprises, they win, if not the approval, at least the kindly tolerance, of clergymen and educators, and establish strong and useful social connections. "Connecticut," says Dr. Smyth, "tells the same shameful story." That state has just sent to the Federal Senate an avowed corruptionist. Most of the newspapers of the state, like those of Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, etc., have been hypnotized with the magic of gold. They are too commercialized to assert their freedom. Accordingly, the vicious circle is complete. Dr. Smyth despairingly exclaims, "Reformers are dumb and helpless before a voter who prefers a ten-dollar bill to civic decency." Mr. Lawson’s Unanswered Charge
In chapter 19, of his "Frenzied Finance," Mr. Lawson writes a sweeping arraignment of the legislature of one of the New England states. He declares that said legislature is bought and sold as are "sausages and fish at the markets." The largest and richest corporations in New England, whose affairs are conducted by the most noted representative citizens, habitually corrupt the said legislature; and the man of wealth among them who would enter protest against the iniquity would be looked on as a "class anarchist." He goes so far as to allege that if in New England a "man of the type of Folk, of Missouri, can be found who will give over six months to turning up the legislative . . . sod of the past ten years, who does not expose to the world a condition of rottenness more rotten than was ever before exhibited to any community in the civilized world, it will be because he has been suffocated by the stench of what he exhumes." This picture of legislative viciousness may seem overdrawn; but, while many of the votaries of the "system" have fumed and threatened, none of them has ever attempted to disprove Mr. Lawson’s grilling stricture. Mr. Rudolph Blankenburg, himself a noted Pennsylvanian, writes, in the April Arena, that the morals of but few states, in their law-making bodies, have been as much debased as those of his state, through the hateful influence and corrupt practises of transportation companies. In former years, venal legislators at Harrisburg, when laws respecting railroads were under scrutiny, would ask each other whether the "yellow envelope" had been distributed. This envelope contained the valuation of the recipient’s conscience "in cash," and was the logic used to obtain his vote for or against a measure. To-day, however, more refined methods are in vogue. A number of crass "boodlers" of the early nineties were put into "stripes" behind iron bars; hence their successors have been constrained to employ artifice in the prostituting of their manhood. Present-day graft usually takes the form of heavy campaign contributions, the placing of relatives in lucrative offices, the release of an inconvenient mortgage, admitting men of influence to "the ground floor," paying for a course of study at a university for the aspiring son of an impecunious legislator, a game of poker, in which the "go-between" agent voluntarily loses to the crooked law-maker enough money to nail down his vote, etc. Free railway passes and telegraph franks are genteel forms of bribery that are freely used to secure the kindly support of impressionable legislators. In fairness to the Keystone State, it should not be forgotten that these refined methods of graft are in vogue in nearly all the states. Last winter Governor Durbin, of Indiana, said, as a parting admonition, that the Legislature then in session would be exposed to the importunities of the most powerful and corrupt professional lobby that has visited itself upon the law-making power in the history of any state.