IN his story of Jean Valjean, Victor Hugo has given a heart-touching picture of the sad fact that human condemnation is often visited upon offences in inverse ratio to their seriousness. For petty stealing the world's reward has ever been a prison; but for colossal peculation, it has not infrequently been praise. History is replete with instances in which so-called Christian nations have been sustained by their Christian subjects in a course which would be pronounced iniquitous if pursued by an individual. So, too, Christian men have consented to a policy and procedure by a syndicate whose profits they share, which they would not consider for a moment were they acting alone. It is this same ethical laxity which leads men who would not entertain a thought of defrauding a neighbor or business friend, to take advantage of the municipality or general government, and enrich themselves at the expense of the people as a whole, without hesitation and without an afterqualm of conscience.
The history of urban government in the United States, during the last few decades, is certainly serious and saddening in its disclosures of the unblushing freedom with which public men have parted with honor and self-respect for pelf; more serious and saddening, however, is its revelation of the moral indifference to these facts, upon the part of a majority of the Christian people, and the ease with which a "judicious" distribution of plunder has served to silence public protest and enable the unscrupulous to retain their vantage. The recognition of these things must make it clear to all that the most precious possession of any country or people,—the only thing which can insure the maintenance of individual rights, and the perpetuity of just government, is an alert communal conscience.
In the agitation of a question of right and wrong, it is lamentable to find that men of equal sincerity are diametrically opposed in judgment, but we may fortify our faith by remembering that the cause of justice and right is always advanced by frank truth-seeking discussion, despite these contradictions of human judgment. The anti-slavery cause achieved its success, not as a question of policy, but as a question of right and wrong. Men of the highest intelligence and of unsullied purpose were arrayed against each other in the struggle; nevertheless, a great ethical triumph, as all now concede, was achieved. So, too, quite recently, in the question of the course of the Administration in the Philippines. While men were so conspicuously divided in their convictions as to what was right and best, the protest against the Government's policy was so distinctly ethical, so indifferent to possible commercial gain and international advantage, as to give most encouraging evidence of the assertive and expanding presence, in the thought of the people at large, of that alert and wholesome moral sense which is sure to ultimately establish the right.
