MUNICIPAL CORRUPTION.
THE sentence of five years' penal servitude passed last Saturday upon Bissert, a New York detective employ(' of the police, is of some importance, first, because it shows the way in which municipal corruption in the United States may yet be brought to an end, and secondly, as a warning to ourselves of the two great dangers involved in our rapid progress towards paternal government. The Ring or corrupt combination which under the name of Tammany governs New York needs for its purposes a large revenue. The combination is intended, first of all, to enrich its managers, whose ideas of wealth are as large as those of most Americans, and secondly, to distribute money among those, honest and dishonest, who support its control over the city. Agents are paid by the score, work is found for those who are out of employ, and for the distressed there are loans, the condition always being that they shall resolutely, or on occasion violently, support Tammany. Originally this money was obtained by a direct kind, of fraud older than Christianity, the faithless stewards of municipal funds making contracts, say, for a hundred thousand pounds' worth of goods or service, and writing down the amount as a quarter of a million. Confederates in office passed the accounts, and the balance went to Tammany funds. After the great revolt against Tammany, however, in which Mr. Jennings, the late Member for Stockport, played so distinguished a part, this method was abandoned as tit* dangerous, and the Ring fell back upon a subtler and more vicious scheme. New York State remains Puritan, though New York City is dissolute, and the Legislature at Albany is always trying to compel citizens to be decent. It constantly passes sharp laws for the regulation of public-houses, the suppression of brothels, and. the punishment of all who keep gaming- houses, and the Tammany chiefs resolved to make of these laws a source of revenue. They can be executed only by the police, the police are .practically nominated by Tammany, and the police sell impunity for cash down. The bulk of the money is handed over to the wirepullers, and a part of it left to those who carry out their orders. A Committee of decent citizens who have been struggling in vain to put this system down at last found what was believed to be conclusive evidence against Bissert, who had demanded and obtained from a woman .t110 as an "initiatory fee" for connivance at her keeping a disorderly house, and after strenuous exertions to protect the wit- nesses and the jury, both of whom the wirepullers fried to corrupt or terrorise, they obtained a verdict. It was expected that even then the punishment would have been nominal, but, to the consternation of Tammany and its friends, the Recorder inflicted a just sentence, which, as the Governor is an honest man, will be attually carried out Tammany was stunned, for if Judges and juries will do their duty, and Governors are firm, its methods of raising revenue will come to an end, and without illicit revenue its organisation must collapse. Indeed, it becomes meaningless, for no one, however adroit in manipulating elections, will go to all that trouble and run all that risk without being heavily paid. The keystone of the system is the badness of the Courts, and if that can be corrected the system will die. If the Courts are good. there will always be prosecutors, and it is the common experience Of mankind that against law steadily tarried out the forces of evil invariably collapse. Whether the New Yorkers will learn that lesson, and by paying Judges decently, protecting witnesses as if they were agents of the State, and remodelling the police so that its men and officers can live without commissions will create good Courts, the fixture will reveal. We have little hope, for the democraty is jealous of good salaries, or of placing the Judges beyond its own control; but it is in this direction, and this only, that there are solid grounds for hope. The London Stipendiaries and the English Courts would crush Tam- many in a twelvemonth, and New York can find as Many honest and competent officials as " London can. Only she must pick them and pay them, and dispense for a time, if it is absolutely necessary; with the privilege of electing Judges, and possibly, though that is less certain, with the intervention of juries. The revelation ought to be taken as a serious warning By- bur ovni citizens. They are always asking for more government, for more sanitary laws, for more laws against gambling, for laws which will turn the drinking-shops into eating-houses, and for laws -for what is rather prudishly called the "cleansing of the streets." Many of their demands are sensible enough, they are all dictated by genuine philanthropy, and gradually, we see reason to believe, they will all be conceded by a Parliament apt to see in good intentions an excuse for the absence alike of wisdom and success. The danger will then be upon us. No such laws can be carried out without inspectors or through any agency but the police, and the temptations placed in the way of both will be very great indeed. The inspectors will be cultivated men; but that under our system, which abolishes'patronage; is the only guarantee for their good behaviour, testimonials to character being, • owing to the universal good nature, worth little or nothing. They will not be, cannot be, men of private means, they can be only moderately paid, and they will be in many departments, especially in the condemnation of insa.nitary property, offered what will seem large incomes. So will be the police by the keepers of brothels and gaming- houses, and it is vain to expect—vide the evidence recently produced at Manchester—that they will with such power in their hands always resist temptation. It is absolutely necessary, if their duties are multiplied, to keep strict watch, to'inflict in every proved case of corruption punishments more severe than dismissal, and, we may add, to modify the law of libel so that to make a well-founded charge shall not be as costly as a Chancery suit.
The public upon this subject is a little bemused by an idea which is not entirely accurate. It is imagined that for some reason not explained English officials, unlike such persons on the Continent and in Chicago, will not take bribes. That is only partly true. Our Courts are no doubt free of corruption, our Civil Service is exceptionally pure, and our police as a body has a very high conception of duty. The tone of the Services is, in fact, regulated by men who are not only for the most part upright and God- fearing, but who have from childhood been accustomed to regard corruption on duty as something singularly base and ungentlemanlike. But we must not forget that in the Crimean War we were compelled to take new precautions against fraudulent contracts, that even now business men doubt whether favouritism in distributing contracts does not exist, and that the investigations • of Sir Edward Fry and Lord Russell of Sillowen convinced their experienced minds that a system of taking illicit commissions, that is, of swindling employers, ran through every class of com- mercial society. We are not so completely protected that we can afford to relax our rules, or to forget that while the desire for comfort incn ases every day, none resent discomfort like those who are possessed of the power to end it. Men are not necessarily frugal because they have a duty to do, and when rent is in arrear, and creditors grow insolent, and worry begins to interfere with work, complimentary cheques are apt to have upon the moral sense a bewildering effect.
Previous page
