We all remember the sensation which, before the war, was ever caused by the discovery of a public defaulter, and the indignation which drove him ever forth from place and country, on his detection. Punishment sure and swift was certain to seize upon him, if he dared linger after the facts were known.
A breach of trust was not then considered a joke, nor theft elevated into the dignity of a fine art, whose most eminent professors were to be regarded with envy and admiration.
Think of the clamor which was raised over the comparatively petty peculations of Swartwout, Schuyler, Fowler, and other small sinners like them, who even found the country too hot to hold them, and died in exile, as an expiation to the public sentiment they had outraged.
Yet their frauds were as molehills to the mountains which the busy hands of our public peculators have heaped up, and are daily piling higher. Within the last ten years, where they stole cents, their successors stole by thousands and tens of thousands; and, instead of flying from punishment, flaunt their crimes and their ill-gotten wealth in the face of the community, heedless either of the arm of the law, or the more potent hiss of public scorn.
And this financial dishonesty of the times is as true of commercial as of political circles, and as patent at Washington as at New York and other cities. "Think you that those eighteen men on whom the tower of Siloam fell, were sinners above all others in Jerusalem? I tell you nay!" Think you that those six or seven on whom the axe of the public press fell, are sinners above all in New York and elsewhere? If all men that have been guilty of fraud in New York and elsewhere were to have a tower fall on them, there would be funerals enough for fifty years.
One of the saddest symptoms of degeneracy in a people is evinced by a desperate levity—a scoffing spirit such as that which inspired the French people when they denied even God, and substituted a prostitute to be their "Goddess of Reason." Much of that spirit is unhappily manifesting itself in our country.
That most fearful picture of a corrupt community drawn by Curran in his description of the public pests of his day—"remaining at the bottom like drowned bodies while soundness remained in them, but rising only as they rotted, and floating only from the buoyancy of corruption"—seems, unhappily, destined to find its parallel here, unless public virtue and public indignation should awake to condemn and chastise the corruption which is tainting and poisoning the air around us.
The judgment which overtook the men of Siloam was visited on them for sins not unlike those which seem to invite a similar judgment from offended Heaven upon our modern Siloams, and is no jesting matter. Nay, in view of the many recent terrible visitations which have fallen upon different parts of our country, many voices have already been raised proclaiming them as marks of Divine wrath against national sins, perpetrated by a people who should, by their lives, testify their sense of the blessings showered upon them in more prodigal profusion than on any other nation in the annals of mankind.
That the great body of our people are corrupt, or that they at heart approve of corruption, no one will be mad enough to maintain. But they are responsible before Heaven and to posterity for the criminal apathy they manifest in their silent sanction of the corruption and crime which are fast making the American name a synonyme for theft, for brazen impudence and unblushing rascality.
In the life of a nation, as in that of an individual, there are periods which are critical; and a restoration to health, or the certainty of speedy death, depends on the way this malady is met. The crisis which now menaces the life and health of the United States cannot be far distant; for private virtue cannot long survive the death of public honor and honesty, nor private morality fail to catch the contagion of public profligacy. If the representative men of a country, those in whom its high trusts are reposed, be corrupt and shameless, they will drag down into the same mire the morals of the people they plunder and misrepresent. Indeed we want no prophet, nor one raised from the dead, to tell us the awfully fatal results. What can be done to stem the fearful torrent of evils that flood the land? We all know that when, in 1765, the famous Stamp Act was passed in the British Parliament, on the news reaching Boston the bells were muffled, and rang a funeral peal. In New York the "Act" was carried through the streets with a death's head bearing this inscription: "The Folly of England and the Ruin of America." So great was the opposition to the "Act," that it was repealed during the spring of 1766. This shows how quickly the evils of society can be put down if people set to work in earnest.