CORRUPTION IN AMERICA. Matthew Arnold Says the Stories About it Are Exaggerated.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 99, 25 April 1885, Page 4

CORRUPTION IN AMERICA. Matthew Arnold Says the Stories About it Are Exaggerated.

The Americans themselves use such strong language in describing the corruption prevalent among them that they cannot be surprised if strangers believe them. For myself, 1 had heard and read so much to the discredit of American political life, how all the beat men kept aloof from it, and those who gave themselves to it were unworthy, that I ended by supposing that the thing must actually be so, and the good Amen- , cans muet be looked for elsewhere than in politics. Then I had the pleasure of dining with Mr Bancroft in Washington, and however he may, in Sir Henry Maine's opinion, overlaud the pre-established harmony of American democracy, he had, at any rate, invited to meet me half a dozen politicians whom in England we should pronounce to be members of Parliament of the highest class, in bearing, manners, tone of feeling, intelligence, information. I discovered that in truth the practice so common in America of calling a politician a "thief" doea not mean so very much more than ia meant in England when we haveheard Lord Beaconsfield called "aliar" and Mr Gladstone "a madman." It means that the speaker disagrees with the politician in question and dislikes him Not that I assent, on the other hand, to the thick-and-thin American patriots, who will tell you that there is no more corruption in the politics and administration of the United States than in those of England. I believe there is more. ' ' * But the corruption is exaggerated ; it is not the wide and deep disease it is often represented ; it is such that the good elements in the nation may, and I believe will, perfectly work it off ; and even now the truth of what I have been saying as to the suitableness and successful working of American institutions is not really affected by it. Amorican society is not in danger from revolution. Here, again, I do not mean that the United States are exempt from the operation of every one of the causes— such a cause as the division between rich and poor, for in -tanee— which may lead to revolution. But I mean that comparatively with the old countries of Europe they are free from the danger of revolution ; and I believe that the good elements in them will make a way for them to i escape out of what they really have of this j danger ; also to escape in the future as well as now, the future ot which some observers announce this danger as so certain and formidable. Lord Macaulay predicted that the United States must come in time to just the same state of things which we witness in England ; that the cities would fill up and the land become occupied, and then, he said, the division between rich and poor would establish itself on the same scale a? with us, and be just as embarrassing He forgot that the United States are without what certainly fixes and accentuates the distinction between rich and poor— the distinction of classes. lSot only have they not the distinction between noble and bourgeois, between aristocracy and middle class ; they have not even the distinction between the bourgeois and peasant or artisan, between the middle and lower class. They have nothing to create it and compel their recognition of it. Their domestic service is done for them by Irish, Germans, Swedes, or negroes. Outside domestic service, within tho range of conditions which an American may in fact be called upon to traverse, he passes easily from one sort of occupation to another, from poverty to riches, and fiom riches to poverty. No one of his posaiblo occupations appears degrad- j ing to him or makes him lose cist ; and poverty itself appears to him as inconvenient and disagreeable rather than as humiliating. When the immigrant from Europe strikes root in his new home he becomes as the American.— [From an Article in " Nineteenth Century."]