Page:Challenge of Facts and Other Essays.djvu/392

Rh hardest position for beginning reform, perhaps, which there is in the Union; but he has made, at the risk of his own political fortunes, the only positive and successful steps towards it which I know of in the country. The newspaper exposures of the Tweed ring would have made no more impression on that body than the pattering of rain on the hide of a rhinoceros, and the members of the ring would to-day have been flaunting their stolen wealth in the face of the public if Mr. Tilden had not reduced their guilt to an arithmetical demonstration, available in a court of law. The Canal ring fight is known to everybody. The governor of New York cannot put a man in a state prison because he is convinced that he has stolen public money, and if the judicial system of New York is such that conviction and sentence cannot be secured, it is the judicial system which the people have given themselves by their representatives. If they reform themselves they will raise their standard of fitness in candidates for the legislature. New legislators will make new laws and judicial systems. Public administrators, if dishonest, will then find a surer path to the penitentiary, and their number will diminish; but I do not see how this sequence can be started anywhere but at its beginning.

I have in mind, however, not only these "reform" efforts, but also administrative reform. I will take a single case which floated in a paragraph through the newspapers, occasioning, so far as I ever saw, very little attention, but which had an immense effect on my mind and which I have often urged in private conversation.

It was stated that the politicians of the southern tier of counties of New York were bitterly hostile to Governor Tilden. The reasons were given, two in number: (1) Mr. Tilden had refused to remove the re-