Demonetization

“ Is it in fact to be endured, that men of talents, reputation, commanding stations in society, shall denounce as inexpedient, unconstitutional, intolerably oppressive, as furnishing legitimate motives for resistance, measures, which not ten years ago they openly supported, nay, themselves originated and pressed upon the country? That they shall claim and insist upon, as their dearest and most essential rights, pretensions, which not ten years ago they denounced as chimerical, unconstitutional, anarchical, involving in practice the destruction of all government? ”

“ When a consequence as drastic as denationalization may be the effect of such conduct, it is not inappropriate that the Government should be charged with proving that the citizen's conduct was a response, not to the command of the statute, but to his own direction. ”

“ Of all the methods by which a cowardly government can harass the people who feed it, none is more despicable than the entanglement of espionage with which it surrounds itself. But as to abolition, what would then become of all those swarms of censors, blackers-out, interpreters, letter-openers, secret police, cabdrivers, porters, and provocative agents who seek their meat from Government? Will not all these men struggle for existence like others, being human creatures, though no one would suppose so? ”

“ Every republic passes through several stages. The first stage is like the early period of insane ravings of a blind man throwing himself right and left. The second is the demagogy which breeds anarchy, which inevitably leads to despotism, not of a legal and open character and, consequently, responsible, but an unseen and unknown despotism, no less effective because exercised by some secret organization, acting even less ceremoniously because it is hidden under the cover and behind the backs of different agents. ”

“ When we have perfected the plan laid before us by the right honorable mover, the world will then see what it is we destroy, and what it is we create. By that test we stand or fall; and by that test I trust that it will be found, in the issue, that we are going to supersede a charter abused to the full extent of all the powers which it could abuse, and exercised in the plenitude of despotism, tyranny, and corruption,—and that in one and the same plan we provide a real chartered security for the rights of men, cruelly violated under that charter. ”

“ Corruption once begun, decay is inevitable and irresistible; the destruction of the Republic is immediate, immeasurable, irredeemable; since history does not record a case of a popular government which has been arrested in its downward course.” Tammany listened to this with ecstatic admiration, cheered to the echo their eloquent oracle, and then went on using the proceeds of a system of blackmail for the perfecting of an engine of corruption to which it is difficult to discover a parallel in the annals of mankind. ”

“ Now if these two measures could be carried out—if liberty could be brought into misapprehension and contempt, and if the state-superstition could be saved from the decay to which it is doomed, the movements of population and the changes in industry, commerce, and finance, could be arrested. The condemnation of all such projects is, once and for all, that they would arrest the march of civilization. ”

“ From time to time an outraged and indignant community will rise up and sweep the dishonest rulers from power; but if the same means for alluring, and the same facilities for organizing the mercenary element remain in existence, the same class of men will continue to regain the temporarily lost places when the watchfulness and energy of the public-spirited citizens become less effective or when the opposition to the dishonest permits itself to be distracted by party polities, and then the same kind of misrule will return. ”

“ The admitted evils inherent in each of these systems being rigidly and permanently excluded, this unique Order, however long it may endure and however extensive its ramifications, cannot ever degenerate into any form of despotism, of oligarchy, or of demagogy which must sooner or later corrupt the machinery of all man-made and essentially defective political institutions. ”

“ But we know that the knout, censorship, repression, and the barriers against outside ideas and education are responsible for these conditions. These people are victims of a government that was criminal. ”

“ Be not reasonable with punitive denationalizations, ex post facto deportations, labels of disloyalty, and all the other stratagems for outlawing human beings from the community of mankind. These devices have put us to shame. ”

“ Not a single drop of blood has been shed by the Provisional Government which has erected no barrier against the free expression of public opinion....” This non-resistance to evil at the moment when a fierce struggle, unfettered by moral or patriotic considerations, was being conducted by some groups of the population for motives of self-preservation and by others for the attainment by violence of extreme demands, was undoubtedly a confession of impotence. ”

“ As usual, the people who practised the deception were scarcely so much to blame as those who, spite of every effort at reform, persisted in maintaining a system which created favouritism, hampered trade, severed family ties, and practically created the smuggling offence which scandalised the official conscience. ”

“ In that hour there will be no more disesteem, or hatred, or contempt for the laws: for, howsoever a people may dislike and resent laws imposed upon them against their will by a subjugating power, no nation disesteems the laws of its own making. ”

“ A demoralization of public sentiment more than ever fatal to public justice and eventually to public order and peace; unscrupulous struggles for the possession of power to be used in the exploitation of opportunities without regard to the rights of the defeated—that is, alternating despotisms. ”

“ As soon as the State recognizes the right of existence of this dung-heap, by its toleration and organization, corruption hitherto hidden and ashamed raises its head and becomes more and more bold, even dragging public organs into its sink. ”

“ We make war upon them, not for the purpose of fighting the Democracy, but to deliver the city of its tyrants, bloodsuckers, and demoralizers. When I express the hope that under the coming city administration more of the Tammany rascalities, not one-tenth of which have so far become publicly known, will be uncovered and exposed to popular abhorrence, and as many as possible of the blackmailers will be sent to jail, I mean that they should be prosecuted, not as Democrats, but as criminals. ”

“ The martello-towers with which we are to repress, if we cannot destroy, the systems of fraud and oppression should not be castles in the air, or clouds in the verge of the horizon, but the enormous and accumulated pile of abuses which have arisen out of their continuance. ”

“ It exposes us, by the scandalous spectacle of its periodical spoils carnivals, to the ridicule and contempt of civilized mankind, promoting among our own people the growth of serious doubts as to the practicability of democratic institutions on a great scale, and in an endless variety of ways it introduces into our political life more elements of demoralization, debasement and decadence than any other agency of evil I know of, aye, perhaps more than all other agencies of evil combined. ”

“ Few things in this fluctuating world are less permanent than the promises of statesmen and the calculations of financiers; and the nation which submits to exclusive privileges, bounties, monopolies, and other abuses, because they are told they will not be permanent, instead of obtaining felicity like ancient wiseacres, by bestowing their temporary property on priests, will obtain the most permanent political machine we know of; a machine invariably constructed by temporary abuses, namely, a bad government. ”

“ Deregulation should be a developmental target integral to every program of international aid, investment, or credit provision. 5. 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. Such a process may require foreign management and supervision for a limited period of time. ”

“ They ought not to take cognizance of any part of a man's life except what is concerned with the legitimate objects of public control, namely, possessions and the use of force. And they ought, by devolution, to leave as large a share of control as possible in the hands of individuals and small groups. If this is not done, the men at the head of these vast organizations will infallibly become tyrannous through the habit of excessive power, and will in time interfere in ways that crush out individual initiative. ”

“ Now this impunity, threatened and assailed, but not destroyed, by these proclamations, would naturally, at every new attack, employ fresh efforts and devices to maintain itself. The proclamations were efficient, it is true, in fettering and embarrassing the honest man, who had neither power in himself nor protection from others; inasmuch as, in order to reach every person, they subjected the movements of each private individual to the arbitrary will of a thousand magistrates and executive officers. ”

“ SPOLIATION SANCTIONED BY CUSTOM
Defects are common to all social systems, and at the most the legal recognition of the so-called communal system and the government of the chiefs was a temporary compromise intended to last only until the people could walk alone. The hostile critics of the system have viewed the question solely by the light of modern civilization, holding the belief that whatever fails to coincide with that system must be forcibly dragged into line with it. ”

“ In this country political corruption and the grasping spirit of corporations are constantly affording the demagogue or the dreamer opportunity to preach the destruction of civil order with great plausibility, giving scope to reckless theorists who have so often, in the world's history, baffled the endeavours of the rational and patient liberalists of their day. ”

“ It is true, that in aristocracies, as well as under a more open form of government, where a single demagogue unfortunately possesses the sovereign power, common sense is too frequently construed into public offence. ”

“ In my judgment, the primary system tends to promote the nomination of self-advertisers, demagogues and wire-pullers by irresponsible minorities, groups, factions, cabals, or secret societies, generally [Pg 229] composed of persons acting in the dark and dominated or controlled by leaders who cannot be held to any accountability, however much they may abuse or prostitute the political power they exercise. ”

“ Since the outburst of the Russian war, political demineralisation has been both wider in its sweep and more rapid in its action, than in any like period of our modern history, and the principles which once had our reverence we now see daily treated with scorn without any deep feeling of indignation. ”

“ How can it abstain from promoting a complete and despotic neutralization of power, since that is the natural consequence of systematic usurpation once commenced? — Such is the power we have to struggle against; a power aspiring, grasping, unscrupulous, consolidated and despotic by nature. ”

“ There is obviously no need, on the present occasion at least, to extend this catalogue of the political delinquencies of this would-be demagogue, whom we may accordingly leave gibbeted and swinging in the winds of the fools' paradise! an object of derision and contempt to those at least who maintain that integrity of purpose and consistency ought not altogether to be discarded from public life. ”

“ Is there not something to be said for a political censorship, if not for a moral one? May not those continental governments who leave the stage practically free in every other respect, but muzzle it politically, be justified by the practical exigencies of the situation? ”

“ For this devolution of power, to the people at large, includes in it a dissolution of the whole form of government established by that people, reduces all the members to their original state of equality, and by annihilating the sovereign power repeals all positive laws whatsoever before enacted. ”

“ We must not content ourselves with merely replacing the vicious Tammany methods of government with better ones, but we must spare no effort to drag the evildoers, the corruptionists, the blackmailers, the protectors and promoters of vice, out of their holes and to bring them to justice and condign punishment, so that they may not only receive their dues, but serve as warning examples. ”

“ The despotic government prevents and suppresses the utterance of every adverse opinion; it executes or imprisons every refractory individual; it encounters by summary proceedings every hostile intention, and while establishing by a system of constant and energetic pressure a state of general and complete submission, it restores at the same time the condition of things originally existing before the rebellion broke out. ”

“ Why, then, in a democratic State, is so valuable a protector of the will, the interests, and pleasure of the majority not bestowed on other branches of the public being? Opponents of the Censorship of Plays have been led by the absence of such other Censorships to conclude that this Office is an archaic survival, persisting into times that have outgrown it. ”