The conviction of ordinary Americans is that our system of government is so evidently perfect, and the course of our development so manifestly healthy, that nothing but sheer blindness can account for any suspicion as to their future stability. To those who question the success of our future we are wont to reply by a smile of genuine pity, or by pointing to the results already achieved and the difficulties which have been surmounted. We have fused the most incongruous race-mixture into one homogeneous nation. We have occupied a continent, and laid the foundations
of a great empire upon a comprehensive and stable adjustment of all the functions of government. We have eliminated the vast system of human slavery from which our ruin had been predicted. We have overcome the most powerful assault upon the integrity of our national existence; and any violent attempt upon our government seems at present to be both impossible of occurrence and hopeless of success.
It cannot be denied, however, that recent events have awakened in the minds of earnest and patriotic Americans a sense of uneasiness and anxiety very different from any similar feeling in the past. The professional politician sees in the corruption lately developed in Washington simply the evidence of decay manifested by a powerful organization which has enjoyed unlimited power and survived the issues which brought it into existence. He would persuade the people that a “rotation” is all that is necessary in order to restore things to an honest and sober condition.
Less thoughtful men demand a return on the part of officials “to the simplicity of our forefathers,” and applaud blindly every effort at retrenchment. All observant writers and thinkers deprecate any such impossibility and are quite clear as to the folly of attempting it. The Nation, March 16, says: “We confess that there is to us something almost as depressing in this kind of talk as in the practice, in which many of our newspapers indulge, of drawing consolation for the present corruption of this republic from the reflection that the corruption of the English monarchy one hundred and fifty years ago was just as great; because both one and the other have a tendency to turn people’s minds away from real remedies and throw them back on quackery.”
The feeling exhibited by this writer is not confined to himself; and the protest which he makes against disguise and quackery is extended much further than he himself has carried it. For the most part careful observers are willing to postpone the question of treatment until the public is settled as to what the malady really is. We are shaken out of our customary habit of mind by witnessing the disgrace and infamy which cover our present administration. Everybody feels that something ought to be done. But to pay particular attention to this portion of the body politic, without examining how far the disease extends and what is its source, is simply to run the risk of suppressing a symptom instead of curing a disorder.
The slightest attempt at candid observation reveals clearly that corruption is not confined to Washington. A few years ago it was supposed to be limited to a certain
class of local politics; then it was restricted to the city of New York. Now it is proved to extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and to exist in every circle of society. The suspicion which once attached to the “ward politician” now hangs about our representatives and senators. Dishonesty in commercial transactions perpetrates renewed outrages. We shall soon have to establish fresh associations to insure our insurance companies and to guarantee our banks. The medical profession feels called upon to issue tracts in order to guard against the physical degeneracy of the entire race.
To deny that there is a pronounced, marked, and universal decadence in morality is simply to stultify all faculties of observation and to contradict the testimony of every sense. It is not necessary to repeat the list of scandals which are daily appearing, or to appeal to the conviction, which prevails everywhere, that we have seen but a small portion of those which really exist. It is the common sentiment that the next century will witness either a complete and radical reform of the present state of things, or else a condition far worse than the enemies of this country have ever yet predicted.
Startling as this conviction may appear, the only thing which ought to surprise us is that the present disorder has not been foreseen and is not now more fully understood. It would have been easy to predict the increase of wealth and the consequent increase of luxury in our midst. No sane person can doubt that these sources of temptation will be greater in the future. The presence of wealth, the possibility of attaining it, will call forth all the activity of the rising generation, and the keenness of the struggle, in
which all are free within the limits of the law, will tend constantly to lower the standard of honesty. The strictness of party discipline, the disgust which the mass of citizens have for attending to the details of politics, offer the widest scope for unprincipled adventurers. There are few careers in which quackery, fraud, and imposture cannot secure those fruits for the possession of which honesty and labor are forced to suffer and to strive.