Social ethics; Social sciences; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
In a certain measure also, the opportunities for pleasure and recreation
depend upon him. To use a former illustration, if a man happens to have
a taste for gambling, if the slot machine affords him diversion, he goes
to those houses which are protected by political influence. If he and
his friends like to drop into a saloon after midnight, or even want to
hear a little music while they drink together early in the evening, he
is breaking the law when he indulges in either of them, and can only be
exempt from arrest or fine because the great political machine is
friendly to him and expects his allegiance in return.
During the campaign, when it was found hard to secure enough local
speakers of the moral tone which was desired, orators were imported from
other parts of the town, from the so-called "better element." Suddenly
it was rumored on all sides that, while the money and speakers for the
reform candidate were coming from the swells, the money which was
backing the corrupt alderman also came from a swell source; that the
president of a street-car combination, for whom he performed constant
offices in the city council, was ready to back him to the extent of
fifty thousand dollars; that this president, too, was a good man, and
sat in high places; that he had recently given a large sum of money to
an educational institution and was therefore as philanthropic, not to
say good and upright, as any man in town; that the corrupt alderman had
the sanction of the highest authorities, and that the lecturers who were
talking against corruption, and the selling and buying of franchises,
were only the cranks, and not the solid business men who had developed
and built up Chicago.
All parts of the community are bound together in ethical development. If
the so-called more enlightened members accept corporate gifts from the
man who buys up the council, and the so-called less enlightened members
accept individual gifts from the man who sells out the council, we
surely must take our punishment together. There is the difference, of
course, that in the first case we act collectively, and in the second
case individually; but is the punishment which follows the first any
lighter or less far-reaching in its consequences than the more obvious
one which follows the second?
Have our morals been so captured by commercialism, to use Mr. Chapman's
generalization, that we do not see a moral dereliction when business or
educational interests are served thereby, although we are still shocked
when the saloon interest is thus served?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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