The principle is the same in the two cases. Just as
the blackmailer and the bribe giver stand on the same evil eminence
of infamy, so the man who makes an enormous fortune by corrupting
Legislatures and municipalities and fleecing his stockholders and the
public stands on a level with the creature who fattens on the blood
money of the gambling house, the saloon and the brothel. Moreover,
both kinds of corruption in the last analysis are far more intimately
connected than would at first sight appear; the wrong-doing is at bottom
the same. Corrupt business and corrupt politics act and react, with
ever increasing debasement, one on the other; the rebate-taker, the
franchise-trafficker, the manipulator of securities, the purveyor and
protector of vice, the black-mailing ward boss, the ballot box stuffer,
the demagogue, the mob leader, the hired bully and mankiller, all alike
work at the same web of corruption, and all alike should be abhorred by
honest men.
The "business" which is hurt by the movement for honesty is the kind of
business which, in the long run, it pays the country to have hurt. It
is the kind of business which has tended to make the very name "high
finance" a term of scandal to which all honest American men of business
should join in putting an end.
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