TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE PANAMA SCANDAL.
IT is well for the French that there is at this moment no Pretender about who possesses the confidence of the masses, even in a limited degree. If there were, we might speedily see again one of those changes in the form of government by which France has so frequently expressed her profound, though half- inarticulate, dissatisfaction with the character of her rulers. Even as it is, the consequences of the Panama scandal may be very grave, for there is, we fear, little hope that the public mind will be reassured by a series of triumphant acquittals. The death of Baron Reinach, the "Patronage Whip" of the Canal, whether he died from worry and insomnia, and consequent over-doses of sulphonal, or, as half the public of Paris believes, committed suicide because a duplicate book of his letters had been stolen, sufficiently shows that there is much in the history of the Canal which will not bear the light. Nobody, in fact, in Paris doubts that the managers, with the experience of the Suez Canal before them, thought that expense hardly signified ; or that great sums were squandered in the belief, possibly the sincere belief, that success would, as in the Suez case, silence criticism ; or that latterly, when it became difficult to raise funds, opponents actual and possible were " conciliated " by " arrangements " which, like many "preliminary payments" in Turkish specula- tions, were never described or intended to be described in detail. The only real question is whether all the waste went into the pockets of engineers, contractors, and financiers, or whether any of it found its way to the bank accounts of journalists and politicians. It is very hard to believe that M. Delahaye, who on Tuesday declared that the latter was the case, spoke entirely without evidence which he could produce, and which, in his judgment, would carry conviction to the Commission of Inquiry he demanded. He refused to mention names until the Inquiry had been authorised ; but he affirmed that more than a hundred Deputies and Senators had received gratifications ; gave, in a whole list of cases, the precise amounts paid ; and, in fact, talked as if he either had the cheques in his pocket, or had seen the most secret books of the Company. The rage of the Chamber, which feels the scandal bitterly, for a reason we will explain presently; its shouts of "Name," "Name," moved him not a whit ; and, in fact, his whole demeanour was that of a man who knows his case thoroughly, and is satisfied that time will soon dispel any doubt as to the bona, fides of his statements. The Government, too, must have been deeply impressed, for it cannot wish its own supporters to be either exposed or traduced ; and as legal proceedings have been in- stituted, it could have delayed inquiry, upon the plea, pro- bably true, that it might poison the public mind unfairly against accused persons on their trial. Yet the Govern- ment yielded at once to the demand, the vote in its favour was unanimous, and the selection of the Commissioners by scruiin de lists deprives the Cabinet of the remotest chance of influencing the Commission. All this looks as if the charges were known to be in some way true, a conviction which, it is said, is repeated everywhere in the lobbies, in the Radical journals, and in the streets, where names are bandied about as if such a scandal were not, even in its inception, discreditable to France. The feeling in Paris, in fact, is that any individual charged may prove his innocence ; but that a great number of second-rate notabilities in the Assembly will be proved to have been guilty of receiving money for services which, without the money, they would. not have rendered.
Nor is there any antecedent impossibility that the evidence will turn out grave. It is the curse of the system of governing through "plain men," that the plain men governing a great country must be placed in a position of horrible temptation. They are generally very poor men of .good intelligence and much ambition, who look to politics as a road to distinction, and who come up to Paris full of vague hopes for themselves as well as their party or their .country. There they find themselves in the most luxurious and dissolute city in the world, possessed of all power, for the real Sovereign in France is the majority of the day, but hampered at every turn by want of the cash which, for them, is the only key to what they think either dignified or happy life. They have, it is true, salaries of £300 a year, but that in Paris will hardly supply them with furnished habitations, cab- hire, and bare food. They get into debt, they are hunted by creditors, they feel as if the alternatives were ready cash or ruin, and a portion of them at last yield, accept the offers constantly made them, and are thence- forward the slaves of the financiers, who, in France, where everything, sooner or later, depends upon official favour, are perpetually wanting votes. One of the most specific of M. Delahaye's charges, for instance, is that a politician, who was what we should call Chairman of a Committee, threatened, if he were not conciliated by a present of £8,000, to give a casting vote against a loan which the Canal Company were requesting the permission of the Assembly to raise. That charge may be utterly untrue, and, indeed, is accompanied by a detail which suggests malice on the part of M. Delahaye's informants, but it exactly illustrates the position in which a hungry Deputy of capacity and position may, in Paris, constantly be found. The candidates are not chosen by the votera specially for probity, but for their opinions, their eloquence, or their " popularity " with sections of the electors, and it is no wonder that many of them, half from want of principle and faith, half because they are dazed by the contradictory facts of their position, with the world at their feet, and nothing in their purses, fall into the toils, and come at last to look on " gratifications " almost as. perquisites of office. The Panama case, if the charges are proved, will perhaps be shown to be exceptionally scan- dalous, because such immense transactions were dependent on favourable votes ; but if there are not purchasable politicians in Paris, Paris is more venomous in its slander than is even its usual wont.
We fear the result will not be the acquittal of every- body assailed before the Commission, and if there is any general or widespread condemnation, the effect on the electors of France will be profound distrust of govern- ment by the Chamber. The peasantry, in particular, have a strong though vague belief that those "gentlemen in Paris" are all rogues together, and that all benefit by the rapidly increasing taxes, and any revelation of specific corruption will deepen this belief into a conviction. An extraordinary number of them are embittered by the failure of the Canal, which they believed up to. the last would turn out a gold-mine, as the Suez Canal had done, and they will be sure to contrast the failure under the Republic with the success achieved by a similar undertaking under the Empire. They will think all their money, instead of a per-centage of it, went to the politicians. They will be ready to overturn anybody or anything in their thirst to be avenged, and as they cannot meddle with the form of government, there being at present no alternative, they will probably insist on changing very radically the composition of the Assembly. If the Right comes out clean, as it hopes, while the Opportunists do not, the Right will have a chance with the peasantry such as they have not enjoyed for the past fifteen years, and we may see a change in the personnel of Government almost amounting to revolution,—the one proscribed class, the highest, being again invested with power. On the other hand, the class exempt from opprobrium may be the Ex- treme Radicals, who are already pointing out that bourgeois government is always corrupt government, and who always profess, sometimes sincerely, sometimes with the obvious bitterness of the grapeless fox, that wealth has, of all enjoyments, the least charm for them. It will be said, of course, that if the Chamber is tainted, so must the country be ; but that, though epigrammatic, is not an exact expression of the truth. We take it that France, and especially Paris, is very much just now in the condition of New York in 1874-5. In New York at that time pecuniary scandals in the city were incessant. Everybody connected with municipal office seemed to have been taking bribes, or jobbing in contracts, or stealing municipal money, and a great many were guilty. Nevertheless, opinion was still so sound that a large proportion of the accused could not face it, but fled or committed suicide ; that juries were as severe as with highwaymen, and that for a time, honest men acquired a strong hold on the reins of the city chanot. The people, even in Paris, will not pardon the guilty if guilt is proved ; and if a party is shown to be tainted, the party will be driven from power as sharply and suddenly as M. Grevy was when he, though personally incorrupt, permitted the taint of corruption to enter the Elysee. Our dread, in fact, is not any undue lenity on the part of the people, but rather that the honest governing men, in dread of an over- violent reaction, will allow inquiry to be suppressed, or partly suppressed, out of fear that a scandal so large, and involving so many reputations, should seriously endanger the safety of France. That would certainly be their im- pulse if they found the scandal lending new strength to the Socialists ; and it is that party, in the cities at all events, which will endeavour to profit by the exposure, if it comes. These, they will say, are the " respectables " who claim the right to govern France ; and the answer that only one man in five is so much as accused will only con- tent reasonable men, and not them with anything like completeness.
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