Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/654

634 It will also be remembered that Mr. Spencer's visit, owing to ill health, had been a hurried one, and that he offered his views as the result of his first impressions only. But of the symptoms in our public life which most impressed him as pointing toward the undermining of free institutions, he mentioned the tyranny of the political machine, under which the citizen, as a rule, had to use his political power according to the dictates of party managers, or else to throw it away; and in this connection he reminded his interviewer of the fact that "constitutions are not made, but grow," that the Americans got their form of government more by a happy accident than by a normal progress, and that here, as it has been elsewhere, it was becoming painfully evident that our political structure, as an artificially devised system, had been growing into something different from that intended. Yet, in spite of all this, Mr. Spencer did not seem to take a very doleful view of our future. From the size of our country and the heterogeneity of its components he thought it safe to predict that, as a nation, we would be long in evolving our ultimate form; but that this ultimate form would be high, considering all that we had accomplished and the troubles over which we had already triumphed, he saw no reason to doubt; and thus he dismissed his interviewer with the prophetic words quoted above.

Scarcely sixteen years have passed since this interview took place, but signs are not wanting to-day which show that during this brief period we have gone from bad to worse, not only in regard to those evils referred to, but to others of a like nature as well. From all our principal cities come startling disclosures of boss rule and its accompanying political corruption. Yet it is difficult to say which is the most startling—the corruption itself, or the apathy toward it evinced by the masses. In New York city the disclosures a few years ago were followed by a tidal wave of municipal reform, but after receding this wave seems to have left the great city in a condition little improved if any. The recent accounts from Pennsylvania furnished us by Mr. Wanamaker, whatever effect they may have on the elections in that State, are of far less interest to the average citizen than the news from Washington, although the dangers implied in the former threaten the most vital interests of the Commonwealth. But, if, in places, the Commonwealths are groaning under political corruption of the worst kind, the country as a whole is groaning under an industrial depression, the causes of which do not seem in any way to concern the professional politician, except perhaps when political capital may be made from taking up the question. As to these causes thoughtful men may differ. But upon this they all must agree: that corporate capital during the last sixteen years has become more and more tyrannical, while the