The erosion of institutional integrity: The perennial conflict between public trust and private gain

“ In fine, stability of institutions must depend upon stability of character. Any number of depraved units cannot form a great nation. The people may seem to be highly civilised, and yet be ready to fall to pieces at first touch of adversity. Without integrity of individual character, they can have no real strength, cohesion, soundness. ”

“ So much for the first and indispensable safeguard.
The next is derivative therefrom, Righteousness in the Establishments of the People. Under this name I include three things, namely, institutions, constitutions, and statutes. Institutions are certain modes of operation, certain social, ecclesiastical, or political contrivances for doing certain things. Thus an agricultural club is a social institution to help farming; a private school is a social institution for educating its pupils; a church is an ecclesiastical institution for the promotion of religion ”

“ Her declension is begun, her ruin approaches; for, omitting all other arguments, can a state be well served when the raising of an opulent fortune in its service, and making a splendid use of that fortune, is a distinction more envied than any which arises from integrity in office or public spirit in government? Can that spirit, which is the parent of national greatness, continue vigorous and diffusive where the desire of wealth, for the sake of a luxury which wealth alone can support, and an ambition aspiring, not to glory, but to profit, are the predominant passions? ”

“ This morning I ask your attention to “A Sermon of the Moral Dangers which are Incident to a State of long-continued Prosperity.”
By prosperity, I mean the present success of schemes which we form for our material purposes. The ambitious man wants power; the acquisitive, money; the vain, admiration; the nation wants numbers, riches, wide territory, commercial and military power. When they succeed in these desires, they attain prosperity. It is the effect of this condition of success on the formation of a moral character which I ask you to consider. ”

“ What is common to them is evidently sordid love of gain; they all put up with a bad name for the sake of gain, and little gain at that. For those who make great gains but from wrong sources, and not the right gains, e.g. despots when they sack cities and spoil temples, we do not call mean but rather wicked, impious, and unjust. ”

“ SECTION I. OF CORRUPTION IN GENERAL. If the fortune of nations, and their tendency to aggrandizement, or to ruin, were to be estimated by merely balancing, on the principles of the last section, articles of profit and loss, every argument in politics would rest on a comparison of national expense with national gain; on a comparison of the numbers who consume, with those who produce or amass the necessaries of life. The columns of the industrious, and the idle, would include all orders of men ”

“ Perhaps no other human interest, not based on purely physical craving, arouses so absorbing a passion: alcoholism itself scarcely asserts a stronger dominion over its devotees.
So widespread has been the zest for gambling among whole races as widely different in character and environment as the British, the Zulu, the Chinese, that we are almost driven to seek some physiological root for the passion. To give an added weight of interest to chance by attaching to it a transfer of property seems to imply a love of hazard as a permanent feature in humanity. ”

“ Having first taken care that our personal influence is cast unhesitatingly upon the right side, we should next seek to create a sound Public Opinion. There is great need for the spread of information regarding the extent of the evil, as the facts in connection with it are at present but little known. Generally speaking, the public have not yet realised that betting and gambling are wrong, or that the evil has spread until it has become a grave national danger. ”

“ Paul read it. "There is a prevalent idea in the school that in order to be loyal to Burrton the students must all stand together, no matter what is done by the student body. That idea is false and in the end it is harmful to the best interests of the school.
"Take for example the custom of betting on the athletics and especially on the annual boat race. This is a custom which should be discouraged by every lover of the school. Betting is gambling; it is an attempt to get something for nothing. That attempt is destructive to morals and dangerous to character. ”

“ In many instances competitors perform only to suit the books of the betting men. Street betting was the most pernicious form of the evil. Some publicans pay street bookmakers to carry on in proximity to their houses. He advocated a large fine and imprisonment for street offenders. ”

“ Although the Committee do not look upon betting as a crime in itself, they yet deplore the spread of a practice which, when carried to excess, they consider opposed to the true interests of sport, injurious to the general community, and apt to degenerate into one of the worst and most mischievous forms of gambling.
5. The Committee consider that the increased prevalence of betting throughout the country is largely due to the great facilities afforded by the press, and to the inducements to bet offered by means of bookmakers’ circulars and tipsters’ advertisements. ”

“ Deregulation should be a developmental target integral to every program of international aid, investment, or credit provision. (e) Corruption is a symptom of systemic institutional failure. Corruption guarantees efficiency and favourable outcomes. The strengthening of institutions is of critical importance. The police, the customs, the courts, the government, its agencies, the tax authorities, the state owned media - all must be subjected to a massive overhaul. ”

“ In such a state of society every field of activity capable of generating such elements of hazard is pressed into the service of gambling: sports and business occupations become popular in proportion as they can by their structure be made to minister to the craving for hazard; every sort of competition where a sufficient element of the incalculable exists is pervaded by gambling.
If the monotony of toil drives large numbers of workers to seek violent sensational relief in gambling, the ennui of idleness prompts the leisured classes to the same abuse. ”

“ The insidious nature of the evil is best illustrated from the fact that almost every week the newspapers record the downfall of some individual whom the public had thought above suspicion. Similar instances occur in the humbler walks of life. The present writer knows of instances in which cottages sometimes lent for religious services were also on occasion used as betting centres. Here is an extract from the letter of a reliable correspondent:—
A bookmaker made one woman in a street his friend. ”

“ Where the skilful draftsmanship of a lottery prospectus allures the dull or sanguine reader into staking his money, by deceiving him as to the size of his chance of winning, such trickery, though designed to appeal to the gambling instinct of investors, is not itself an act or a part of gambling: it is simply fraud, though not necessarily fraud in a legal sense. ”

“ He is aware that he is acting wrongly, as well as illegally, in using the firm’s money for any private purpose of his own. But in understanding and assessing the quality of guilt involved in such action, two circumstances extenuating his act, though not the gambling habit which has induced it, must be taken into account. A poor man who frequently bets must sooner or later be cleared out and unable, out of his own resources, to meet his obligations. He is induced to yield to the temptation the more readily for two reasons. ”

“ Yet who wins, who loses, is a matter of but momentary concern to any except a score or two of participants; whereas, if there is one thing that should characterize a university, it is its cheerful sacrifice of temporary for permanent gains,—in Dr. Eliot's fine phrase, its devotion to the durable satisfactions of life.
The making of money, through intercollegiate athletics, continues a curse, not only to institutions, but as well to individual players. ”

“ Our great men succumb so far to the forms of the day as to peril their integrity for the sake of adding to the weight of their personal character the authority of office, or making a real [520] government titular. Our politics are full of adventurers, who having by education and social innocence a good repute in the state, break away from the law of honesty and think they can afford to join the devil’s party. ’Tis odious, these offenders in high life. You rally to the support of old charities and the cause of literature, and there, to be sure, are these brazen faces. ”

“ I repeat, it is the purity, it is the very existence of the representative character of our institutions that is at stake; for when it is known that seats in this body can be bought and held by right of purchase, sellers and purchasers will multiply in the same measure as the wealth of this country grows to be plundered, as the interests vary to be subserved, as the rapacity of greed increases to be glutted, and the day will come when this body will represent the blood-suckers and the oppressors of the people, and no longer the people themselves. ”

“ A patience which is grand; a brave and cold neglect of the offices which prudence exacts, so it be done in a deep upper piety; a consent to solitude and inaction, which proceeds out of an unwillingness to violate character, is the century which makes the gem. Whilst therefore I desire to express the respect and joy I feel before this sublime connection of reforms, now in their infancy around us, I urge the more earnestly the paramount duties of self-reliance. I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity. ”

“ Integrity is compelled to reject both, and spurning at doctrines, calculated to incite the few to plunder the many, or the many to plunder the few, leaves every man under the strongest excitement to labour for his own and the national prosperity, from a conviction, that the laws are a mantle of justice, and not an intricate net to fish for his earnings.
Our policy is founded upon the idea, that it is both wise and just, to leave the distribution of property to industry and talents; that what they acquire is all their own, except what they owe to society ”

“ These communities will, moreover, feel a growing need of the good-will and the assistance of their respective governments in their efforts to widen the scope, and to consolidate the foundations, of the institutions committed to their charge. Let them beware lest, in their eagerness to further the aims of their beloved Cause, they should be led unwittingly to bargain with their Faith, to compromise with their essential principles, or to sacrifice, in return for any material advantage which their institutions may derive, the integrity of their spiritual ideals. ”

“ Integrity enhances human worth. Iniquities devastate a city like fire and pestilence. Social wealth and happiness are through right living. Goodness is a commodity. Conscience in a cashier has a cash value. If arts and industries are flowers and fruits, moralities are the roots that nourish them. Disobedience is slavery. Obedience is liberty. Disobedience to law of fire or water or acid is death. Obedience to law of color gives the artist his skill; obedience to the law of eloquence gives the orator his force; obedience to the law of iron gives the inventor his tool ”

“ If, then, the corruption in American politics be great, the evil is due rather to the system than to any inherent inferiority in the native honesty of the people. Their integrity, if it falls, has the excuse of abundant temptation. ”

“ Which is thought the greatest benefactor of a college, he who endows it with money or with mind? Even there it is the purse, not the pen that is the symbol of honour, and the University is "up for California," not Parnassus.
Even in politics the purse turns the scale. Let a party wrestle never so hard, it cannot throw the dollar. Money controls and commands talent, not talent money. The successful shopkeeper frowns on and browbeats the accomplished politician, who has too much justice for the wharf and the board of brokers ”

“ For those that have been in reputation for wisdom and honour to fall from their excellency, this troubles the fountains by grieving some, and corrupts the springs by infecting others and emboldening them to do likewise. 2. For the righteous to be oppressed, and run down, and trampled upon, by the violence or subtlety of evil men, to be displaced and thrust into obscurity, this is the troubling of the fountains of justice and corrupting the very springs of government, ch. ”

“ Institutions that fortify the mind, inspire courage, and promote national felicity, can never tend to national ruin.
Is it not possible, amidst our admiration of arts, to find some place for these? Let statesmen, who are intrusted with the government of nations, reply for themselves. It is their business to shew, whether they climb into stations of eminence, merely to display a passion of interest, which they had better indulge in obscurity; and whether they have capacity to understand the happiness of a people, the conduct of whose affairs they are so willing to undertake. ”

“ The committee called attention to the anti-gambling amendment adopted by the convention in the following language: “The passion for gambling to which the system of lotteries formerly ministered has found fresh opportunity under the so-called Ives Pool bill, and, under color and pretext of betting upon horse races, is working widespread demoralization and ruin among the young and weak throughout the community. We have extended the prohibition against lotteries so as to include pool-selling, bookmaking and other forms of gambling. ”

“ Since the decision in the Kempton Park case, it has been impossible for the police to stop bookmakers carrying on their trade at athletic meetings, except at the direct request of the proprietors of the ground.
29. The Committee, therefore, recommend that on any race-course or other ground on which a sport is being carried on, where a printed notice is publicly exposed by the responsible authorities to the effect that “No betting is allowed,” a bookmaker who continues to bet shall be liable to summary arrest and a fine. ”

“ Justice Bucknill which appears to follow upon the lines of that most unfortunate and harmful judgment. The alteration of the law needed here (none should be needed but for the interpretation put upon the words “person using” and “any other person” in section 30 of the Betting Act of 1853, as meaning persons in authority in the place, in the Powell v. Kempton Park case) is to so alter the section that the proprietors or [164] committee of a club shall not escape responsibility for individuals, like the bookmakers in a race-course ring, carrying on betting businesses. ”

“ A change in the spirit of the people, a higher sense of self-respect, a deeper regard for the community of interests which would lead a man to treat his neighbour as a man to be helped, not injured, would do more to put an end to this modern habit than any number of rules and regulations. It has been suggested that gambling could be almost entirely put an end to were sellers of shares to be compelled to hand in the name of the possessor, or the numbers of bonds where bonds are sold. ”

“ Now, even a workman would lose caste with his respectable companions if he were seen drunk. We must at any cost enlist this compelling power of Public Opinion. We want all classes to pass on confirmed gamblers the same judgment as they pass on confirmed drinkers. We want, too, a public opinion which will condemn commercial gambling just as much as betting upon horses or anything else, or playing cards for high stakes. There is, indeed, a healthy growth of religious opinion at the present time with regard to raffles at bazaars, but there is much need for further education even on this question. ”