THE GLOBE. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1880. AMERICANISING THE COLONIES

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 2098, 13 November 1880, Page 2

THE GLOBE. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1880. AMERICANISING THE COLONIES

The least admirable of American institutions is that by which, when a change in the party in power occurs, then a change in the whole administrative corps of tho country occurs also. The new comers dismiss the servants of their adversaries holus-bolus, and their friends enjoy the loaves and fishes. The result is natural. The gentlemen who are hoisted into their appointments, knowing the tenure of their office to be most precarious, are determined to make the most of it, and wholesale corruption is the result. Official venality is the rule in the United States. It is frequently practically demonstrated in New Zealand. Many of our officials could tell stories, if they pleased, of interviews with American agents, in which the estimate held by such agents of official morality has been brought strongly to the front. If tho said agents had been English the result would probably have been that they would have been kicked out of the office, hut the American estimate of official) corruption being a description of national institution, the individual Americans displaying it are looked leniently upon, and the remark that Government officials are much like other men of character and honor does not leap to the lips as readily as it might. What Mr. Berry may see in the arrangement worthy of being copied it is difficult to say, but that he is trying to Americanise Victorian institutions is very certain. “ Black Wednesday,” in the first instance was a species of political St. Bartholomew’s Day. The opponents of the Government were massacred in a manner worthy of the ’middle ages, and although a few of the leading men were spared for a time, their turn came in due course and the vacant appointments were filled by friends. The same shameless spirit is displayed in tho appointment of Mr. Benjamin Berry, although this case stands in a different category. It is a case of nepotism pure and simple, but it serves to show the description of feeling that is required to enable a man to subvert the established custom of his country in favor of another nation’s custom that leads inevitably to corruption and all that is dangerous and foul in official life. Of Mr Benjamin Berry himself nobody knows, or wants to know, anything. He is the son of Mr. Berry, senior, and may, for the matter of that, be a very excellent and amiable young man, though he is certainly not endowed with any very great strength of character, or ho would indignantly refuse to accept the gifts offered to him by a too fond, but politically immoral father. Mr. Benjamin Berry may be classed with individuals who have been rendered notorious by the force of circumstances, and is probably as much to be pitied as blamed. He was placed in tho Treasury Department when comparatively a baby, and was pushed up until by the time he was twenty he was high up in the service. When Mr. Service came into power he did not imitate Mr. Berry in endeavoring to Americanise the Givil Service. But he could not get over Mr. Benjamin’s appointment. He was not Benjamin’s father; and the sight of that young man in the high places of tho Treasury, lording it over men whose hair had grown white in the service, galled him very considerably. Benjamin was consequently reduced to a post more suited to his years and capacity. It is not known whether, like Richard Cromwell, he was thankful to sink to a lower level, for his biography has still to be written by his doting father on the latter’s retirement from office-—-but down he went. Not, however, for long. Berry Pare rose once more to the surface, and Benjamin followed him with startling rapidity. Once more did the seniors in the Treasury take their orders from this ingenuous youth and bless the new order of things. Nepotism reigned triumphant, and the man who of all others should have upheld the dignity of the civil service, was tho first to lower its morality. There is hat one comforting feature in tho whole transaction, and that is the condemnation with which the proceeding has been viewed by the country at largo. Both the Opposition and Government papers are strong in their disapprobation of the Premier’s actions in the matter. So far there is something so congratulate Victoria on. But examples in high places are dangerous, and such poison as Mr. Graham Berry deals in is likely to spread through the body politic with alarming rapidity. . It is to he trusted that tho Benjamin Berry fiasco is not tho beginning of the end. In America the manner in which political straggles are often carried on stinks so in tho nostrils of the better classes that they refuse to he dragged through tho mud for party purposes. If Mr. Berry perseveres in his present course and gains converts to his creed, tho same state of affairs will soon be found to exist in tho country which has chosen him as a model man to conduct its destinies.