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"Conscience and Courage in Citizenship”
HE notion still persists that the ethical
law governing political conduct is lower
than that which should control men in
their private dealings. The obligation
to act honestly, when dealing as an in
dividual with a single fellowman, is
often fully felt and lived up to by those
who do not scruple or hesitate to deal
unfairly when the other party is not an
T
individual, but is a collection of individuals made,
by the accidents of race or territorial boundaries,
into a national unit. This moral obliquity in the
sense of political right and wrong springs out of a
fault of reasoning by which the quality of an act
is to be measured by the amount of immediate in
convenience it works to a particular individual.
When the consequences of wrong fall directly upon
some certain victim who is present and whose suf
fering may be seen, it appeals to the conscience,
but the sense of moral responsibility grows weaker
when the consequences of tyranny, oppression or
dishonesty are distributed among many and
may be passed on from one to another so that the
wrongful force will become blended with oflier evil
influences in such manner that the doer of the
wrong does not directly see the consequences of his
act, and the persons wronged do not exactly know
how they are wronged or certainly who is responsi
ble. Men will defraud a nation who would scorn
to deal unfairly with an individual, and will rob
a generation who would not deprive a neighbor o.f
his slightest, immediate good.
The Law of Public Morality.
But the law of public morality is just as high
and just as binding as the law of private morality;
the laws governing both classes of human conduct
are inexorable as the laws of nature. There is a
law of ethics corresponding to the physical law of
the conservation of energy. No force is destroyed.
You may change it into as many forms as Proteus
had; you may dissipate it so that only a feeble
manifestation of it can be felt at a particular
place, but it is never destroyed. Neither its na
ture, its quantity, or its essential quality is ever
changed. The fundamental principle of all true
morality, public or private, is never to be ignored,
that there is an inherent quality of right or wrong
in every act. Truth is truth, and no alchemy has
yet been discovered by which it can be made out
of falsehood. Justice is of its own substance, and
cannot be compounded of fraud.
And, it should not be forgotten, that the conse
quences of a wrong are no less certain because
not immediate. An unjust and oppressive law may
not bring immediate suffering, but it is, to use the
happy metaphor of Carlyle, “A bill on Nature’s
reality, to be met when presented there for payment
with the answer, ‘No effects.’ ” When an op
pressive law, for instance an oppressive tax, is
enforced, its consequences do not fall immediately
upon the highest and most powerful order. The
highest and most powerful order recoup by levying
heavier exactions on the next lower order, and so,
“the burden of evil is passed on; shifted from
back to back, and from rank to rank; and so lands
ultimately on the dumb lowest rank, who with spade
and mattock, with sore heart and empty wallet,
daily come in contact with reality and can pass the
cheat no further.’’
The burden of the graft in the building of the
Pennsylvania capital will not deprive her wealthy
and powerful citizens of a single comfort, but will
come, sooner or later, to the humble worker in her
mines, and mean to him scantier food for his table,
fewer clothes for his family, and less education for
his children. The United States Senator or land
commissioner who makes private use of his public
position and who, by perjury or its subornation,
defrauds the nation of the public domain, deprives
no man immediately of his home, but in a genera
tion or more, when population has increased, some
man will spend years of toil to pay for what he
should have received free from the nation’s bounty.
By Walter JlcEireath
In the court of public opinion men’s habits are
judged by the common, ordinary standards of the
times in which they live, but their virtues are ap
praised according to the highest of ethical concep
tions. Men’s faults are human, in a sense at least,
relative and temporal, but there is a certain eter
nalness and absoluteness about virtue, and a con
tinuing sameness by which the standard of virtue
is the same in all ages. The polygamy of Abraham
is disregarded in the world’s estimate of his great
character, and men see only his preeminent virtues.
And men are always excused to some degree, for
adopting a lower standard of public than of pri
vate conduct. There have been times when bad
men were suffered with complaisance, and their
misdeeds received little condemnation, but there has
never been a time when the heart of men did not
pay reverential tribute to unsullied public virtue.
No passages in history so stir the heart as those
which ascribe some heroic quality of integrity of
conscience to some great public citizen who did not
take advantage of the lower standard of political
ethics, but pitched his public life on a plane of
absolute integrity. The characters of Epaminondas
and Aristides are among the greatest glories of
Grecian achievement. The world will never forget
the answer of Fabricios when Pyrrhus tried to bribe
him with offers of gold that, “Poverty, with an
honest name, is more to be desired than wealth”;
or the noble tribute to his character, that, “You
might lead the sun from his course, as easily as
Fabricius from the path of honor.” There are few
nobler passages in Shakespeare than Antony’s
tribute to the character of Brutus, that he was
“the noblest Roman of them all,” because “He
only, in a general honest thought and common
good to all,” made one of the conspirators, and the
elements were
“So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up,
And say to the world, ‘This was a man.’ ”
But it is not necessary for us to go back to
ancient times to find inspiring examples of public
integrity. No sturdy Roman expresed a nobler
sentiment than that of Henry Clay when he de
clared that he would “rather be right than to be
president,” and no man was ever able, truthfully,
to say of himself greater words than those graven
upon the stone sarcophagus which holds his body
in the tomb at Lexington, that he could appeal to
the Divine Judge of human hearts, that he had
never been influenced in his public acts by any con
sideration except the public good.
The Courage of Right Doing.
But a right conscience is not of itself a guaranty
of right civic conduct any more than mere good in
tentions are a substitute for right private conduct.
The sense of right must be accompanied by the
courage to do the right, and this courage is not
any more necessary in the person occupying public
office than it is in the man who holds the ballot.
Let the voter —the ultimate political unit, the pri
mary source of political power—be honest, unpur
chasable, intelligent and courageous, and public
officers will not dare to be corrupt and public abuses
will not long exist. Owen Wister in a recent num
ber of “Everybody’s Magazine,” in an article on
the disgraceful state of Pennsylvania politics, sums
up his diagnosis of the political sickness of that
state with the statement, “We find, upon anal
ysis, that with complacency must be joined also
stupidity and cowardice.”
It must be remembered, however, that political
courage is a courage peculiarly liable to be counter
feited. There is the courage to demand the rights
of the voiceless many of the humble and weak
against the desire and interests of the powerful
few. This, sometimes, requires great, real courage,
but its simulation frequently represents the lowest
form of cowardly demagoguery. There is a higher
courage, sometimes, in the ability to stand quiet
in the clamor and storm upon the rock of conserva
tism. Not a conservatism which suffers wrong—
not a conservatism of concession to injustice, op-
The Golden Age for April 23, 1908.
pression, or dishonesty, but a conservatism founded
upon that golden maxim ot Jefferson s inaugural,
which will never get itself improved upon in the
political ethics of man —“Equal and exact justice
to all men.”
'Retrospection.
By Fannie Kimzey.
It’s not the life I've lived outside
Where folks can see and praise,
But if the Father has the guide
Os all my secret ways:
The ways the light ne’er shines upon,
And not an eye can see,
The ways of mine that’s known of none
Except my God and me.
It’s not the songs I sing out loud,
The easy uttered word,
But that the eye above the cloud
Discerns the thoughts unheard:
The thoughts that grope in valleys dim,
Or dare the heights to mount,
The thoughts of mine that’s known of Him,
Os these I must account!
It’s not the page my heart unrolls,
The outside of the cup.
But secret motives that it holds,
That I must offer up;
The motives deep like springs that gush
Unbidden from the ground,
And not the streams that roar and rush
And wake the echoes round!
0! Thou who boldest in Thy hand
The balances divine,
Teach me to read and understand,
And make my will like Thine;
Till every thought and motive white
Works out in praise to Thee,
And all is right within the sight
Os just my God and me!
H *
The Prohibition Tight.
One of the most significant things that has come
to pass in the making of prohibition history in
Georgia is the ruling of the court in the Roberts
case.
Mr. Roberts was making a soft drink, the basis
of which was a kind of malt liquor that contained
something like five per cent of alcohol. Mr. Roberts
kept a stock of that liquor in an outhouse in his
yard; kept it locked up and allowed nobody to go
into the house except the employes engaged in the
manufacture of the soft drink. He was tried on a
criminal charge for keeping intoxicating liquors in
a public place, was convicted and sentenced. Judge
B. 11. Hill in an exceedingly clear and forcible
enunciation of the ruling of the Appellate Court
decided that a stock room connected with a manu
factory in which is stored the material used in .the
manufacture which is kept locked and in which
no business is transacted and to which employes
alone have access, is not a public place in the con
templation of the statue. That opinion will settle
many questions. The S. S. S. Co. has such a stock
room: the B. B. B s must have; every chemist in
the business must have, but none of these are
contrary to the prohibition law. They are not
doing business to violate the law. They are not
working against the law, nor the “peace and dignity
ot the State.” I have no doubt but that the ruling
of the court will be applauded by every member of
the legislature that voted for the bill. Incident
ally the court puts its finger on the feature of the
act that defines prohibited liquors as “those which
it drunk to excess will produce intoxication.” A
lower court has held that a two per cent beer might
be an intoxicating drink. There are many rumors
that a great variety of what they call “near beers”
is on the market, and that they are making men
and boys drunk. Os course this condition of things
is intolerable and will be stopped very soon. But
it is probable that the legislature will have to
amend the bill by adding to the description of
prohibited liquor, as now expressed, these words,
“or any alcoholic liquor containing more than one
half of one per cent.”
