MR. E. L. GODKIN, EDITOR OF THE “EVENING POST,” NEW YORK.
The sworn foe of Tammany.
CHAPTER IV.
THE LEXOW SEARCHLIGHT.
Mr. Lowell good-humouredly chaffed John Bull when he declared that
He detests the same faults in himself he neglected,
When he sees them again in his child’s glass reflected,
and we only need to glance at current English criticisms upon American affairs to justify the poet’s remark. Especially is this the case with a vice which of all others is regarded as distinctively English. John Bull has plenty of faults, but of those which render him odious to his neighbours there is none which is quite so loathsome as his “unctuous rectitude.” That phrase, coined by Mr. Rhodes to express the contempt which he and every one who knew the facts felt on contemplating the hypocrisy and Pharisaism displayed in connection with the Jameson Raid, is likely to live long after Mr. Rhodes has vanished from this mortal scene. This tendency to Pharisaism and self-righteous complacency, which thanks God that it is not as other men are, is one of those vices which John Bull’s children seem to have inherited in full measure. We are pretty good at Pharisaism in the Old Country, but we are “not a circumstance,” to use the familiar slang, when we compare ourselves to some of the Pharisees reared across the Atlantic. This has nowhere been brought into such strong relief as when on the very eve of the exposure and discomfiture of Tammany their spokesmen took the stump and talked like very Pecksniffs concerning the immaculate purity of Tammany Hall.
The same characteristic is observable in all of them. Whether it is Boss Tweed, appealing confidently to the verdict of honest men upon a career of colossal theft and almost inconceivable fraud; or Mr. Croker, who, after surveying his whole life, declares that he has not discovered a single action which he has reason to regret, for he has not done anything but good all his life; or Bourke Cochran, who was at one time the Apollo and the Demosthenes of Tammany, the same unctuous rectitude oozes out of every pore. When Tammany was at its heyday of prosperity and power in 1889, it assembled in its thousands to cheer enthusiastically the impassioned oratory of Mr. Cochran, who declared, as among the self-evident truths which found an echo in every breast, that “if corruption prevails among the people, liberty will become a blighting curse, subversive of order. Corruption once begun, decay is inevitable and irresistible; the destruction of the Republic is immediate, immeasurable, irredeemable; since history does not record a case of a popular government which has been arrested in its downward course.” Tammany listened to this with ecstatic admiration, cheered to the echo their eloquent oracle, and then went on using the proceeds of a system of blackmail for the perfecting of an engine of corruption to which it is difficult to discover a parallel in the annals of mankind.
In Mr. Croker’s case, his calm consciousness of incorruptible virtue seems to be based upon a curious inversion of a belief in a Divine Providence. Tammany is not strong in theology, but Mr. Croker, in talking to me, based his argument in favour of the excellence of Tammany on the postulate that the government of the universe was founded on the law of righteousness. This being the case, it was only possible to reconcile the continued existence of Tammany on one of two hypotheses. Either the domination of evil was permitted for a season for some sufficient cause hidden in the inscrutable mysteries of the Divine councils, or we must boldly assert that, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, Tammany rule was in accordance with the eternal law, Credo quia impossibile, rather than admit that so great an anomaly as a terrestrial Inferno could be permitted to exist by the good government of God. Mr. Croker, of course, adopted the latter hypothesis. There is much in it, no doubt, especially to those in Mr. Croker’s position. It is, however, open to the fatal objection that the same process of logic would à fortiori secure a certificate of good conduct for the Great Assassin of Stamboul himself. The Ottoman Empire has lasted even longer than Tammany Hall, but even Mr. Croker would shrink from maintaining that Abdul Hamid was on that account the exemplary vicegerent of the Almighty.