Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

CHAPTER IV.

MEN WHO CANNOT BE BOUGHT.

Thou must be brave thyself,

If thou the truth would teach;
Live truly, and thy life shall be
A great and noble creed.

'Tis a very good world we live in,

To lend, or to spend, or to give in ;

But to beg, or to borrow, or get a man's own,
'Tis the very worst world that ever was known.
BULWER LYTTON.

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,

Is the immediate jewel of their souls:

Who steals my purse, steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;

But he that filches from me my good name,

Robs me of that which not enriches him,

And makes me poor indeed.-SHAKESPEARE.

L'honneur vaut mieux que l'argent.-French Proverb.

FIRST, there are men who can be bought

There are

rogues innumerable, who are ready to sell their bodies and souls for money and for drink. Who has not heard of the elections which have been made void through bribery and corruption? This is not the way to enjoy liberty or to keep it. The men who sell themselves are slaves; their buyers are dishonest and unprincipled. Freedom has its humbugs. "I'm standing on the soil of liberty," said an orator. "You ain't," replied a bootmaker in the audience. "You're standing in a pair of boots you never paid me for."

The tendency of men is ever to go with the majority— to go with the huzzas. "Majority," said Schiller, "what

CHAP. IV.

does that mean?

The French Quack.

71

Sense has ever centred in the few.

Votes should be weighed, not counted. That state must sooner or later go to ruin where numbers sway and ignorance decides."

When the secession from the Scotch Church took place, Norman Macleod said it was a great trial to the flesh to keep by the unpopular side, and to act out what conscience dictated as the line of duty. Scorn and hissing greeted him at every turn. "I saw a tomb to-day," he says in one of his letters, "in the chapel of Holyrood, with this inscription, 'Here lies an honest man!' I only wish to live in such a way as to entitle me to the same éloge."

The ignorant and careless are at the mercy of the unprincipled; and the ignorant are as yet greatly in the majority. When a French quack was taken before the Correctional Tribunal at Paris for obstructing the Pont Neuf, the magistrate said to him, "Sirrah! how is it you. draw such crowds about you, and extract so much money from them in selling your 'infallible' rubbish ?" "My lord," replied the quack, "how many people do you think cross the Pont Neuf in the hour?" "I don't know," said the judge. "Then I can tell you-about ten thousand; and how many of these do you think are wise?" "Oh, perhaps a hundred !" "It is too many," said the quack; "but I leave the hundred persons to you, and take the nine thousand and nine hundred for my customers!"

Men are bribed in all directions. They have no spirit. of probity, self-respect, or manly dignity. If they had, they would spurn bribes in every form. Government servants

are bribed to pass goods, fit or unfit for use. Hence soldiers' half-tanned shoes give way on a march; their shoddy coats become ragged; their tinned provisions are found. rotten. Captain Nares had a sad account to give of the

feeding of his sailors while in the Arctic regions. All this is accomplished by bribery and corruption in the lower quarters of the civil service.

A

Much is done in the way of illicit commissions. cheque finds its way to a certain official, and he passes the account. Thus many a man becomes rich upon a moderate salary. After a great act of corruption had been practised by the servant of a public company, a notice was placed over the office door to this effect: "The servants of the company are not allowed to take bribes." The cook gets a commission from the tradesman; the butler has a secret understanding with the wine merchant.

"These illicit commissions," says the Times, "do much to poison business relations. But if the vice were ever to mount from the servants' hall or the market and invade any public office, there would be an end to efficiency or confidence in public men. It is all-important that the public service should be pure, and that no suspicion should rest on the name of any official in a post of confidence. It would be an evil day if it were generally suspected that civil servants took backsheesh or pots de vin."

The

An inventor suggested a method for registering the number of persons entering an omnibus, but the Secretary was unable to entertain it. "It is of no use to us," he said; "the machine which we want is one that will make our men honest, and that, I am afraid, we are not likely to meet with." We want honest men! is the cry everywhere. police courts too often reveal the stealing and swindling of men in whom confidence has been placed; and the result is that they are dragged down from confidence to ruin. It is trustworthy character that is most wanted. Character is reliableness; convincing other men by your acts that you can be trusted.

CHAP. IV.

Russian Bribes.

73

Abroad it is the same.

The excuse is
The Moscow

Russia, Egypt, and Spain are the worst. In Russia the corruption of public servants, even of the highest grade, is most gross. You must buy your way by gold. Bribery in every conceivable form ist practised, from arrangements between furnishers and the officials who should control them, to the direct handing over of the goods,-is undeniably prevalent. that the public servants are so badly paid. and Petersburg Railway was constructed at great expense. Vast sums were paid to engineers and workmen, and stolen by overseers and directors. Prince Mentchikoff accompanied his Imperial Master in a jaunt through the capital, undertaken for the benefit of the Persian Ambassador, who was making a visit to the country. The Persian surveyed golden domes, granite pillars, glittering miles of shops, with true Oriental indifference. The Emperor at last bent towards his favourite and whispered with an air of vexation, "Can't we find anything that will astonish this fellow ?" "Yes, your Majesty," replied the Prince; "show him the accounts of the Moscow and Petersburg Railway!" At Alexandria, in Egypt, the "leakage," as it is called, is enormous, unless bought off by gold. In Spain, every ship has to work its way into port after bribing the customs officers. The excuse is the same as in Russia; the civil servants of Spain cannot live except by taking bribes.

Even in republics men are apt and willing to be bribed. Money gets over many difficulties; it solves many problems. In America, the cream of republics, bribery is conducted in a wholesale way. The simple salary of an official is not sufficient. Even the highest in office is bribed by presents of carriages and horses, and even by hard cash. The most farseeing and honest of American statesmen see that jobbery and corruption are fast undermining the efficiency of the

administration, and debasing the standard of public virtue.*

It has been the same all over the world. It does not matter what the form of government is called-whether a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a republic. It is not the form of government, but the men who administer it. Selfishly used, political power is a curse; intelligently and impartially used, it may be one of the greatest blessings to a community. If selfishness begins with the governing classes, woe to the country that is governed. The evil spreads downwards, and includes all classes, even the poorest. race of life becomes one for mere pelf and self. is abandoned. Honesty is a forgotten virtue. Faith dies out; and society becomes a scramble for place and money.

The Principle

Yet there are men who have refused to be bought, in all times and ages. Even the poorest, inspired by duty, have refused to sell themselves for money. Among the North

* See North American Review for January 1871. Mr. Jacob D. Cox says that the degrading hunt for public place and public money extends all over the States. There is no backwoods hamlet so obscure that its moral atmosphere has escaped the contagion. When one of the conflicting parties in the State has overcome the other, there is almost a sweep of the places of pay and power, down to the pettiest clerkship. The war-cry is "To the victors belong the spoils !" "We have to confess with shame," says Mr. Cox, "that its effect on our politics is the same as the cry of 'Beauty and booty' upon an army entering a captured city. We have become so familiarised with a disgraceful scramble to such an extent that we now wonder at our own apathy, and begin to realise the fact that the public conscience has become partially seared (p. 89). During Mr. Johnson's administration "a condition of things existed which rivalled the most corrupt era that can be found in the history of any nation." Sycophancy, adulation, bribery, and all the rest of the loathsome catalogue of political vices, thicken as we descend, till we reach the "rough" doing the ballot-stuffing or the curbstone-fighting for his party, and making his gains by stealing the money he has received from some candidate to "treat the independent voters, who may be bought with a dram of whisky" (p. 92).

[ocr errors]
« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »