These fifty cases are not like fifty instances of peculation discovered by expert eyes under a watchful system, leaving it pretty certain that there was no more behind. Fifty individual thefts in eighty years would not make a shocking story as the world goes. But this collection is merely illustrative of an immense mass of similar material which cannot be produced to the home reader any more than an ore bed could; though the existence thereof any one may verify by proper investigation. The opportunities of public men for improper acquisition are limitless; there is no one over them to prevent them: they are themselves the watchmen; and if they work with outside rogues detection is ordinarily impossible. The discovery of each of these fifty instances was the result of a blunder on the part of these very careful and intelligent thieves; of a quarrel amongst themselves, a mere chance of some sort, and by the law of chances may be taken to represent fifty thousand similar undetected frauds. Consider too the character of many of these items; some represent a foul episode in the history of a state; others in that of a great city; in one case the fact that the politics of a rich commonwealth have been corrupt for half a century is compressed into a statement of a few lines which is capable of being expanded to a volume of separate accusations. Fifty years of spoliation of a great state: eighteen thousand days; say one hundred separate acts a day: one million eight hundred thousand large and petty frauds, thefts and peculations are crowded into this single chapter. Each of the fifty foregoing items affords a glimpse at rivers, seas, regions of official rascality. In one case it is a state legislature which goes wrong. This means that back of each of its tainted members there is a whole history of putridity, a rotten county, a score of rotten townships, years of local crookedness, trickery, intrigue, falsehood, bribery and corruption. The district and county which sells or traffics its honors; which sends an unworthy man to represent it in the councils of the nation, must itself first have undergone a process of degeneration the details whereof would alone require a volume. The instances in the foregoing list do not represent individual or sporadic cases of disease; they indicate a moral pestilence, the result of widespread filth and unsanitary conditions of long standing and the existence whereof is proven by the additional testimony of the array of intelligent, unbiased and high-minded men and women, statesmen, students, publicists, lawyers and teachers, already quoted. Taking the whole evidence together, the record and the witnesses, it amounts to a mass of absolutely convincing and even overwhelming proof of the thoroughly evil and corrupt character of this government which for the past eighty years has been imposed upon the American people by the political oligarchy directing the controllable vote. CHAPTER XV