Tom Watson's Magazine, Vol. I, No. 2, April 1905

by Various

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; today 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 cannot reach them.

Great Britain is a republic in all save name, yet no such conditions prevail under its government. France is a republic, yet its people are not despoiled by official brigands, neither is the free expression of its electorate crushed beneath the massed weight of its moneyed interests.

I count it a disgrace to be an American so long as these degrading conditions prevail. It is a dishonor to live in a city, community, state or nation where thievery is condoned or tolerated, and it is cowardly weakness for the honest majority to assume that the problem of corruption is past their solving.

The most formidable barrier in the way of permanent redress has been erected and is maintained by those who are checked by it. It consists of the absurd assumption that our material prosperity has been the consequence of the perfect provisions of our National Constitution. It is manifested in the senseless worship of the forefathers, and the ignorant deification of the founders of the document, which for more than a hundred years has served as a model for our state, municipal and local governments.

We have come to recognize the hopelessness of honest majorities when pitted against the machinery of our municipal governments; we no longer deny that the cumbersome machinery of our state governments lends itself to the manipulation of corrupt private interests; the suspicion has dawned on us that our National Congress is more concerned with thwarting public sentiment than in conforming to it; and despite all this knowledge we steadfastly refuse to direct our gaze to the prime cause of these abuses.

With a hundred monopolies filching from us that which we have created—and doing it under the guise of law and by sanction of the Constitution; with legislatures, executives and courts scorning to put into operation those remedies for which we have legally voted—and declining to do so under the authority of the Constitution; with a system of taxation which places all the burdens on those who are poor because they are producers of wealth, and releasing from taxation those who have become rich because of their exploitation of labor and through the debauching of its representatives—this system being founded on constitutional decisions—we yet cling to the childish delusion that ours is the only perfect government ever bequeathed to mankind.

Compared with the governments of England and France we have only the semblance of self-rule, while they possess the substance. The people of Germany have more direct influence over legislation than have those of the United States. Despite an autocratic emperor, surrounded as he is by a nobility and protected by the most powerful standing army in the world, the people of Germany have made greater progress along the road of democracy within the last twenty years than we have.

If in England there is valid reason to believe that the majority of the people hold an opinion counter to that of the administration in power, Parliament is dissolved and a direct appeal is made to the voters for a new body of representatives. The new Parliament meets and proceeds to pass the laws demanded by the electorate. There is a House of Lords, but it does not dare reject a measure known to be popular. There is a king, but he has not exercised his veto power for more than a century and a half, and one need not be a prophet to hazard that he never will exercise it again. There is no supreme court in England. In that benighted monarchy when the people pass a law it is a law, and not a guess.

To all intents and purposes the same procedure obtains in France and in a score of other countries which might be named. Ours is the only country on earth where the vote of a citizen has no direct significance.