CORRUPTION IN WASHINGTON.
IF any situation were ever serious in the United States, where something in the air seems to make all troubles sit lightly, the situation in Washington would be serious now. The whole American people is beginning to suspect that its Administration is corrupt. Owing to causes—some of which are patent, and a few still obscure—the charges of pecuniary corruption levelled of late at so many high American officials have never been received very seriously by the citizens as a body. They do not pay much attention in ordinary times to the doings of the Departments at Washington, which occupy a very small space in daily American life ; they distrust the charges so recklessly flung against their enemies by American party journalists, and they have much of the tolerance for jobs which used to mark and discredit the unreformed English municipalities. When, therefore, they heard that this journal had accused a Minister of the Interior of selling Indian con- tracts, and that that party had demanded an overhaul of mili- tary and naval accounts ; that certain speculators had declared the Minister in England a corrupt man, and that undersold liquor-dealers had accused the President's Private Secretary of complicity with the Whisky Ring, they went on minding very little. Those things, they observed, were always said, and very likely they were not true, and at all events, nobody knew for certain. It was true that accusations were coming un- pleasantly fast, no less than four departments of the General Government being attacked; but still the general sentiment was, so far as appeared, one of languid though gradually heating annoyance, which included the accusers almost as much as the accused. Opinion was generally in favour of a very lenient judgment on the accused, when the Belknap affair suddenly aroused the popular attention. For the first time, a member of the Cabinet itself, the responsible head of a great depart- ment, was accused not of jobbery, or even of taking secret commission on official contracts, but of receiving direct bribes in cash for appointments which it was his duty to fill up with- out favour, and acknowledged himself guilty. The statements of Mr. Marsh mattered little. The accusers who now abound within the Union are so indifferent to truth in their statements, and so reckless in their partisan animosities, that the public always waits for " corroboration,"—which, in the nature of things, can seldom, if ever, be obtained. The newspaper reports did not matter much, for of course a Democrat journalist would believe anything about a Republican Secre- tary, however weak the evidence might be. But the confes- sion of General Belknap mattered a great deal, and the accept- ance of his resignation by the President mattered a great deal more. American citizens, as a body, do not accuse or suspect President Grant of personal corruption, but they have been forced to believe that his sensitiveness about the character of his entourage is coarse and leathery, that he keeps people about him after he has well understood it would be better that he should let them go, that he tolerates jobs in the English sense—that is, unfair preferences to friends, supporters, and relatives—and that he either does not suspect or disregards the conduct of people who trade on his supposed favour. He has always supported every accused man up to the last moment, it may well be from a rough loyalty to his nominees. If, then, President Grant could not defend General Belknap, head of a de- pertinent which the President thoroughly understands, what conclusion was possible but that, whatever the precise facts to be extracted on trial, General Belknap was guilty; and if General Belknap were guilty, why not others in similar positions and similarly tempted ? Every charge against a department previously attributed to malice, every sinister rumour hitherto overlooked, every suspicion before denounced as spiteful, assumed a sudden importance, and ordinary Americans began to believe, as a few Americans have believed for a long time, that corruption at Washington was deep-seated, and would require something very like the actual cautery to eradicate. The " incredible excitement" reported by the cable followed.. The Democrat majority in the House of Representatives resolved to seize the opportunity. They impeached General Belknap. They ordered what is virtually a new trial of the acquitted General Babcock, on the pretext of charging him with the revelation of official secrets. They sent out Commissioners to the Navy Yards, nominally with orders to inquire into "expenditures," but almost avowedly with a secret idea that some of the "expendi- tures" have gone into the pockets of some of Mr. Robeson's subordinates, if not into his own. They display, in fact, a deter- mination to sift the rumours of corruption to the bottom, and it would be affectation to expect that in turning up such a cesspool there will not be plenty of feculence made palpable to the general nose and eyes. This man or that man may come un- scathed out of the ordeal, but scarcely any Department will, and the repute of the American system and of the American political caste will receive another terrible blow,—a blow in- jurious to Liberal institutions throughout the world. It matters nothing that such scenes have occurred in almost all countries not so free,—that in Russia official corruption is the despair of the Czars ; that in Austria it has helped the defeat of armies ; that even in Prussia, the Hohenzollern has been compelled to issue some severe orders about great men ; and that in England, though official malvereation is nearly unknown, it is so because the governing class, wanting nothing, and least of all wanting money, visits peculation in any shape with irresistible social penalties. A Republic is expected, and reasonably expected, to be cleaner-handed than a Monarchy, and every American scandal discredits self-government as a polity to be adopted by mankind. " Republicanism becomes corrupt,"—in that sentence is, at this moment, the most effec- tive defence alike of personal government and of government through an aristocratic caste. The temptation to speculate on the causes of such a situation as Washington now presents are great, but we must reserve ourselves to-day for something more concrete,—the considera- tion of the remedy, and about this we should, if Americans, he just now very practical indeed. The people of the United States may not, with their busy lives, their excessively scattered energies—for the existence of the separate States, whatever its compensations, undoubtedly scatters political energy—and their tolerant habits of thought, be able to keep up a watchful- ness on Washington such as Englishmen keep up upon their Cabinet and House of Commons. They may not be able, with their jealous yeoman voters — so impatient of pre- tension and exclusiveness — and their sceptical better class—so full of exclusiveness, adopted in self-defence—be able to banish the professional politicians whose ascendancy in the political world, like the ascendancy of speculators in the commercial world, is the root of most of the evil, and of all the pecuniary corruption in the Union. They may not even be able, in the teeth of deeply-rooted prejudice, of party-feeling, and of the Senate's vested interest in jobbing, to establish a scientifically organised and irremovable Civil Service, perhaps the best guarantee against corruption yet devised. But they can secure one remedial measure without violence, or a re- modelling of their machinery, or a break with any of their traditions. Their Constitution enables them to elect any President they choose, and invests him with power to keep the Central Administration pure. These Secretaries, and Superin- tendents, and Controllers, who are charged, truly or falsely, with taking bribes, are, by the Constitution, his clerks. If the President chooses to make honesty a sine quit non as a qualification for office, to uphold any man who hates corruption, and to dismiss any man who even tolerates it, he can do it ; ;Ind if he is elected for that end, he will make it his business to do it. It is nonsense to talk of the pressure of opinion in favour of this or that man. As a matter of fact, the President chooses whom he likes, sustains whom he likes, and dismisses whom he likes, without respecting opinion at all. This very President has chosen, during his Presidency, Mr. Chandler, sustained Mr. Delano, and superseded Mr. Motley in defiance of the whole " opinion" of the country ; and if he had devoted himself to such work, could have made a suspicion of corruption as unpleasant to a Secretary as a suspicion of cowardice to a soldier. That he did not so devote himself may be the result of preoccupation, or ambition of a third term, or, as we believe, of a sort of leatheriness of mind,—an obtuse- ness which has been produced in him by a life of soldiering and politics. This is not specially discreditable to him, but it ought to be a reason for electing a very different man, a man who can not only represent a party, but preside effectually over an administration ; who can hold the reins in his own hand, and compel the Departments at all events to abstain from pick- ing and stealing. The people of the United States do not want a man who can govern them, but they do want a man who can govern their servants,—a steward who can stop waste and peculation, an agent who will see that offices are not made, as in Turkey or China, stepping-stones to wealth. They can find such a man if they please this year, and their duty is to find him, and show that it is not by their default that the phrase " American politician " is becoming an insult, to be hurled like mud against any European Liberal. Their Con- stitution hampers their action very often, but it does not prevent them from electing a President with a distinct mandate to turn thieves out of public offices, and it does not limit his power to perform that necessary, if disagreeable task.
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