OFFICIAL PAY AND OFFICIAL CREDIT.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4802, 12 August 1876, Page 1 (Supplement)

OFFICIAL PAY AND OFFICIAL CREDIT.

(Prom the Pall Mall Gazette.)

Americans pride themselves upon being a shrewd people in the affairs of everyday life. In their own business they never hesitate to pay a good man a good price, because long experience has taught them, as it has taught the rest of the world, that those who fail to do so are pretty sure to have a fool or a knave in their employ at the critical time. As they give nothing for nothing themselves, or if possible rather less, they are not so sanguine as to expect more liberal treatment from other people. But in the region of politics all this is changed. There the most important harassing work is to be done cheaply, and very cheaply too. The salaries attached to really first-rate positions are notoriously insufficient to attract the most competent men, and what is last in cash is nut made up in credit. A foolish parsimony, as far removed from real economy as extravagance is from liberality, seems herein to govern their proceedings. A more than ordinarily. silly fit of this kind is upon them at the present time. Not content with reducing the incomes of their ambassadors to first-rate Powers below the level of what would be paid to good head clerks, the latest telegram informs us that the Senate has decided upon paying Presidents for the future 25,000d015., instead of SO.OOOdols, to which latter sum their income was raised a few years ago. Similar reductions will, no doubt, be made in the salaries of officials who are already ill-paid for the work which they do. It is even more true to-day than when X)e Tocqueville wrote that in the United States the salaries “seem to decrease as the authority of those who receive them augments.” Can anything be more shortsightad than such a policy? Just now in particular it is of the last moment to remove the canker of corruption from the public offices. It is notorious that the miserable scandals which are being made public one after another are but samples of a system which pervades the whole official community. Pour times the cost of the present civil administration would be a moderate price for the American people to pay in order to get rid once for all of such a blot upon their public character, and to remove such a serious danger from their future as this rottenness, which threatens to prey upon every limb of the commonwealth. But with a blindness that is almost incredible they deliberately take that very course which must tend to aggravate the malady. If the present men remain in office on the smaller pay it will only be with a sense of grievance, and because the pay itself is but a percentage on that which they contrive to gain out of the pockets of the public. If new officials are found they must be, in a thoroughly commercial country like America, where all can get profitable employment who are worthy of it, simply the offsoouring of the “ politicians,” who reckon on being able to do as well as or better than their predecessors. Once iu our history we had to deal with a similar evil under circumstances in which it was perhaps more difficult to eradicate, hut eradicated it was, and by a man whose name appears in the most triumphant passage of American annals. When Lord Cornwallis went to India, practically as dictator, in 1786, “the Court of Directors still continued to act on the old and vicious principle of small salaries and large perquisites”—we - seem to be reading of the America of to-day—“ the salaries came from the Treasury, which they guarded with the parsimony of a miser; the perquisites came from the people, and excited little observation, though they served to vitiate the -whole system of government. Every man who returned to England rich was considered a rogue, and every man who came home poor was set down as a fool.” “ The earlier members of the Indian service, civil and military,” says another writer, “ must be pronounced to have been the most corrupt body of officials that ever brought disgrace on a civilised Government. Within a few months this was completely altered, and from that time to this the .character of the Indian services has stood as high as it had before fallen low ; a result brought about “ mainly by the establishment of a highly liberal system of remuneration in lieu of the pittances iu the way of pay heretofore allowed to all classes, and which afforded the recipients no alternative between poverty and dishonesty.” He, in fact, as he himself said, put the officials beyond the reach of temptation. It is too much to expect that Americans will find among them a statesman of the nobleness and purity of Lord Cornwallis, their public life, sad to say,, has discouraged the growth of such meii, but they may at least copy his methods. Let every fraudulent official be removed from his place, and those who are appointed he thoroughly well paid, and then one great step will have been taken towards the purification of American public life. They, and we too, should remember that in these times, when the voice of the people is all-powerful, the nation itself must he judged by the character of those whom’it appoints as its rulers.