Of course we have had our faults—abundance of them. We have made mistakes, and in the course of human events will probably make many more, for nations never become great without suffering and sacrifice; they can no more hope to escape these fiery proofs than individuals. But at least we have, as a nation, been guiltless of the graver sins against God, his church, and humanity. And it is on this fact above all that men who believe in a God ruling over this world found their hopes for the future.
It is not our purpose here even to glance at our history in the past hundred years. Our present business is with the year just closing. Looking at the plain, level facts before us, we confess that they wear an ugly aspect. It is painful to be compelled to acknowledge that the dawn of the hundredth year of our national existence might have been far brighter. Unhappily, the legacy of many years of mistakes, misgovernment, and—let it be confessed with pain—of malfeasance in high places, both in State and national offices, has accumulated to fall upon this year of all others. One good, at least, has come from it. The nation, in American fashion, injured as it was, has at length faced the evil, which is in itself and due to no extraneous influence at all. The year opened with investigations.
Indeed, it has been pre-eminently a year of investigations; and much matter there was to inquire into. The result showed a wide-spread corruption in the national administration. This corruption was probably one of the results of the war; but it was none the less corruption on that account. The Rebellion had been crushed, heroic deeds had been done. Væ victis! There was an army of political heroes waiting for their reward. There are more ways than one of sacking a city. In these days we sack nations—as witness Germany and France—and arrange the terms of the sacking in peaceful convention. There are insects that thrive and grow fat on corruption. Some of these set on the carcase of the dead South. Others settled on the offices of national, State, and municipal government. They have been eating their way into the body politic for sixteen years. There is only a rotten shell left, and this year that shell fell to pieces.
In treating of the last Presidential election in our annual review of four years back, we wrote: “General Grant was re-elected. The opposition arrayed against him … utterly broke down. General Grant’s is undoubtedly a national election; we trust, therefore, that his future term may correspond with the confidence placed in his rule by the nation; may be productive of all the good which we expect of it for the nation at large; may heal up old wounds still sore; and may lead the country wisely into a new era of prosperity and peace.”
It is plain that we bore no ill-will to the President. What shall we say of his administration to-day? What need we say in face of the action of the country regarding the administration?
The heart sickens at going over the record of the year. It is only the culmination of the preceding years of ill-government which have been duly noted in this review, and which there is no special reason now to enumerate. We would not undertake to say that the government under President Grant has, as a whole, been a failure; but in great part it undoubtedly has been. We use a studiously
mild term in describing it as eminently unsatisfactory, and the verdict of the nation, as given in the recent Presidential elections, endorses our opinion. Whoever may be seated in the President’s chair for the next four years, President Grant and his party have been condemned by the feeling and vote of the county, not because he was so foolish as to aspire to a third term on the strength of an administration that fell to pieces of its own rottenness and on a proposed anti-Catholic ticket, but simply because the country was sick of it. The disgrace and fall of the Secretary of War, the recall of the American Minister at the English court, the disclosures of corruption and inexcusable expenditure in the civil service, the plain traces of corruption in every department of the public service down to the most obscure, such as the peddling in post-traderships by the brother of the President—all of which came to a head within the present year; the stanch support given by the President to men whom he had appointed to office, many of whose dealings were shown to be of a most doubtful character, so much so that some of them just escaped the fate of thieves by technicalities of the law that in themselves were moral condemnation—all this was only the rotten ripeness of a growth diseased from the beginning.
But if the year, notwithstanding gloomy forebodings, to which we had grown accustomed, has been one of disgrace and disaster where pride and glory ought to have had place, it has not been without its bright side. The Presidential elections have been a series of surprises. Late in last year, as we noted at the time, President Grant made what not only we but all the world regarded as a bold and infamous bid for a third term in his speech at Des Moines. He aimed at riding into power on that favorite, and too often successful, hobby of a hard-pressed politician—an anti-Catholic ticket. This, in politics in these days, we take to be the last resource of an ignoble mind. Nevertheless, the bid was undoubtedly well timed. All the world is up in arms against the Catholic Church. No government dare hold out a hand to help her and hope to live. It is only recently that the President of Ecuador did so, and what was the result? He fell at the hand of an assassin, as De Rossi fell before him. The sentiment
of English speaking peoples had been appealed to with all the force and violence of which such a man as Mr. Gladstone is capable, and his words were widely read in this country, being multiplied and confirmed by the secular and sectarian press. The President saw this opportunity, and took it at its flood-tide in a speech that was as ingenious as it was malignant. A Methodist bishop, in a large and important conclave of Methodist ministers, took up the cry, and, amid the acclamations of his brethren, nominated General Grant for a third term. Then came out from the holes and corners those imps of mischief, who are always at hand to do evil work at a time when the minds of men are excited—secret societies—and tendered their services and votes to President Grant. An adroit bidder for the Presidency bade higher and went further even than the President on the same ticket. He looked the winning man, and the secret societies transferred their allegiance to him.
This was undoubtedly a clever diversion for the Republican party. Dark clouds hovered over them, but there stood the Pope. He was their old ally in difficulties, and, if only they held him up to execration, the bull they were goading would turn aside from the lancers who were drawing his life-blood, and charge only on the red rag. How miserably they misread the people of this country has been seen.