THE DRY-ROT OF STATES. T HERE is something sickening, as well
as something almost unintelligible, in the accounts of corruption which pour in upon us from every quarter of the world. No form of Government and no pride of race seems to be the smallest defence against the passion of stealing from the public. We are wholly unable to sympathise fully with either China or Japan in the amazing war now raging in the Far East ; but it is with a feeling of positive pain that we read a letter like the terrible one from the Gulf of Pechili, published in the Times of Wednesday morning, accounting for the defeat of the Chinese. It is a story of corruption which to Englishmen seems almost incredible. The safety of the State has been deliberately sacrificed to official greed, no man employed in the departments of supply buying good weapons if buying inferior ones would enable him to pocket a larger commission from contractors. Quick-firing guns, for example, were rejected in favour of slow-firing, for this reason alone; millions were spent at Chefoo on useless defences because the Governor there wanted his share of contracts ; and Port Arthur was left exposed on the land side because it paid nobody to finish the defences in that direction. The ships were starved in the way of armament, the soldiers were starved in the way of supplies. Even in the throes of the war itself, with the position of the great officials themselves at stake, the passion for stealing cannot be kept down. A despatch boat absolutely essential for the conveyance of orders was rejected in favour of two needless torpedo boats, because the official entrusted with the purchase could, upon the latter, make large profits. The Chilian fleet could have been bought, if the Chiliana would have bribed the buying department at Pekin ; but they would not, and a transac- tion which, whatever its international aspects, might have saved the Empire, was permitted to fall through. The very Generals buy their positions, and then quarrel with each other for pecuniary reasons. The vital force of a vast Empire which holds together the most ancient of civilisations, is in fact sold piecemeal every day in order that its officials may make fortunes, and lay them up in little gold bars the size and shape of the biscuits called, we believe, in the baking trade, finger-biscuits.
The Chinese are yellow, Mongolians, Monarchists, and Pagans ; but we do not see that, except in their want of patriotism, they are any worse than certain classes in New York, who are white, Anglo-Saxons, Republicans, and, in theory at least, believers in Christianity. It is bad to sell the defence of a State, but it is as bad to sell the defence of internal order ; and the recently dominant municipal party in New York has been doing that for years. • It is impossible to read the evidence taken before the Lexow Commission without acknowledging that every place in the police was sold, on the distinct understanding that the officers who purchased should recoup themselves by selling immunity to grogshops, disorderly houses, blackmailers, and, in short, all classes of lawbreakers who did not by murder arouse the active detesta- tion of the community. The guilty hardly deny the accusations, and though for the moment New York is aroused, there is no evidence that it will continue wakeful, or that the moment the exposures cease, the corruption—which, be it remembered, was "put down" in the similar uprising of seventeen years ago—will not recommence. The poison has got into the system, and will work its effect again. Things are as bad in Italy, where Government after Government has been if raid to ascertain fully the true relation between privi- leged Banks and leading politicians ; where the public believe that in some departments a heavy percentage on the revenue never reaches the Treasury at all ; and where in one great province, Sicily, the collection of rates was so universally corrupt as to drive the lower citizens into overt acts of rebellion, only to be suppressed by the display of overwhelming military force. The corruption in France is not quite so bad because a Frenchman has an efficient side to his head, which hates corruption, not so much because it is immoral as because it impairs the prospect of success ; but even in France the situation is deplorable. Only one man has been fairly punished for the frightful robbery of the Panama Canal shareholders, which must have implicated a hundred politicians, and no one has suffered for the state of affairs recently revealed at Toulon, which is inexplicable except on the theory of corruption as objectionable if not as dangerous as any revealed in the Chinese Navy. There are now frightful stories circulated of news- paper blackmailing, stories still more widely believed of transactions between officials and the railways, and the "Lanessan affair," upon which the Government has taken sudden and peremptory action. The accusation officially made in this case is that M. de Lanessan, who occupied a position equivalent to that of the Indian Viceroy, paid• a leading journal of Paris for political support in early in. formation, not only as to Colonial movements, but as to railway concessions which it was intended to make. M. de Lanessan has been cashiered peremptorily, on the evidence of letters seized by the Judge, without a hearing ; and as he fiercely denies the Justice of his dismissal, the general verdict of " Guilty " passed against him by opinion is outrageously unjust, but that verdict of itself proves the want of con- fidence which France, taught by recent revelations, has begun to feel in the honesty of her public men. There is no doubt either that while thousands of employes in France are marked by exemplary " probite," maintained under cir- cumstances of exceptional temptation, there is ground for the public distrust, and for saying that the scene we now see in China might, if degeneracy went only a little further, be seen also in European Monarchies and Republics. Politicians in England and in Germany may be considered clean handed, but if that can be unreservedly said of the whole State service in any other country, then" preter- natural suspicion" is in all other countries doing a great many persons most shameful wrong and injustice. Except in Japan, England, Germany, and Holland, distrust is visible everywhere.
We hope that distrust will yet lead to more sensible legislation. At present in almost all countries the chiefs of the State treat corruption either as an offence against the service, a disciplinary offence in fact, sufficiently punished by dismissal, or as a grand offence to be punished, like treason, after solemn inquiry and numerous delays, and by a sentence equal to that passed upon embezzle- ment. That mode of proceeding is perfectly justifiable in certain cases' and should not be abandoned, but it often acts like the English procedure in perjury cases, which is so difficult that perjurers, though utterly condemned by the law and by opinion, almost invariably escape. There should be an alternative procedure, much simpler, much shorter, and conveying a deep social humiliation. We can see no reason whatever why a servant of the State who takes a bribe, direct or indirect, should not be punished like an ordinary thief by a Magistrate, and with six months' hard labour. He is just as guilty as the ordinary thief, evidence against him may be just as clear, and he can defend himself just as well before a Magis- trate,—indeed better ; for the man guilty of official cor- ruption is almost sure to be better educated than the ordinary criminal. Such a method of proceeding would be far more dreaded than the present one, and would indeed, as we believe, in most European countries render corruption as rare as the stealing of spoons by educated men. We cannot see where the objection to this course arises, or why corruption should be treated as in any degree a political offence, or be regarded as a matter requiring the intervention of great officers of State. It is as a rule theft, and nothing else, and we can see no reason whatever why it should not be so regarded. Indeed, in one department of the public service it is so regarded, all Post Office misdemeanours being prosecuted, like offences against individuals, with- out fuss or oratory or long explanations in the papers. We would try and punish the politician who gives "early information" to a contractor, or who passes bad goods on his department, or who takes a commission to prefer one contractor to another, just like a thieving postman, or a post-office clerk who steals postal orders, and thereby take from him at once all the halo of "polities," which at present, in most countries of Europe, still surrounds the man who peculates either from the State or from those who agree to deal with it, and whose honesty is almost as important to the community as that of the officials themselves. It is bad enough to hear of contracts going to great firms, because they habitually support this party or the other, but at least they may be as efficient as their rivals. The contractor who pays money for a contract, the official who takes a bribe, or the understrapper who accepts a commission, cannot be perfectly efficient. He is a slave, to begin with, and the money paid must be re- couped somehow, and it always is recouped, either through unfair charges, which are thefts from the State, or through a debasing of the quality of the goods, which may be theft, but may also be a ruinous form of treason. It is not by savage sentences rarely inflicted that the Emperor of China, or the French democracy, or any other despot will "put down" corruption, but by moderate sentences involving social humiliation, invariably and speedily in- flicted in every case of guilt.
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