There's "Dough" in Every Street Contract: A Preacher Takes On City Hall

At the Unitarian services in Tacoma Hall on Sunday, the minister, Rev. Napoleon Hoagland, spoke both morning and evening. In the morning his theme was "Social Atheism." He said this stinging term had been applied by an English journalist to a picture of municipal corruption in American cities as presented in a magazine article in a leading American review by Professor Andrew D. White, about a year ago. In the opening sentence of the article Professor White declares that, with very few exceptions, the city governments of the United States are the worst in Christendom.

Mr. White speaks from a wide experience with municipal affairs in America and is familiar with nearly all the great cities in Europe as well as America. He does not speak merely to criticise but to cure. His strictures are not born of malice or spite, but of patriotism and benevolence. Hear him: "One has but to walk along the streets to notice at once that some evil principle is at work; that everywhere are wretched pavements, foul docks, inadequate streets and inefficient systems of sewerage, paving and lighting. In wet weather many of the more important thoroughfares are covered with reeking mud; in dry weather this mud, reduced to an impalpable dust containing the germs of disease, is blown into the houses and nostrils of the citizens." You recognize the picture, do you not?

He goes on to say that not long ago he was in Constantinople, after having just passed from one end of Europe to the other, but no place reminded him so much of home as the foul streets of the Turkish capital, which represents the most degraded despotism and most barbaric government in all Europe.

Aside from the foul and unwholesome condition of the streets and environs, another characteristic of municipal government in America is the moral corruption of the officials. Mr. White says "that the city halls of the larger towns are the acknowledged centers of the vilest corruption; that as a rule the men who sit in the councils of our larger cities are men who in no other country would think of aspiring to such positions; that elsewhere they would consider themselves lucky in keeping out of prisons." As a sample of the intelligence of the guardians of public health not infrequently appointed in large cities, one is mentioned who defined hygienics as "the bad smell that rises from standing water."

That reminds me of the laconic if not lucid cause of death which the health officer in a town not a thousand miles from Olympia specifies in several instances — namely, that the deceased was "killed."

Mr. White goes on to say that he saw a franchise for which a million dollars could easily have been obtained given away by the common council of an American city. In another city he saw the streets, which were in a deplorable condition, neglected month after month, the main attention of the council having been given to a struggle over the appointment of a cemetery keeper at a salary of $10 a week.

Is the picture exaggerated? Many of you know it is not. Those of you who have read the local papers during the past year know what charges of crookedness and bossism have been made against our councilmen. Some of you may know that the charges are not all without foundation. Some of you doubtless are in a position to figure out what an incompetent and unreliable city engineer has cost you individually and the town at large. Others could tell of a state official whose voice is frequently heard in prayer meetings, but of whom it is said by those who know him better than I that his honesty when the purse is concerned is not above reproach. But it is not worth while to dwell on what we hear; what we know is bad enough.

It is humiliating enough to face the facts of carelessness, inefficiency, trickery and fraud that so frequently come to the surface in the management of state and municipal affairs throughout the country. In England and Europe buildings are erected that are a credit to the people, both as to the honesty of their construction and their serviceableness. The rule is that not a whisper of suspicion is breathed against the honesty of the transaction. But what is the usual history of public buildings in America? Why, it seems difficult for a board of aldermen to contract for the grading of a street without there being "dough" in it for some one. There seems to be something in the very atmosphere of the council chamber that is demoralizing.

Without trying to illustrate any further what is already too apparent, let us ask our rulers some practical questions: Why is it so many scoundrels are elected to office? Why is it so many people turn scoundrels so soon after being elected? Why is it that honesty in the administration of public affairs is so much more rare in democratic America than in despotic Europe? Why is it that people in our country are so much more ready to steal from the state or municipality than they are from their next door neighbors? Is it because Americans as a people have a defective conscience? Is there something in our climate or our political institutions that breeds the moral weakness that so frequently succumbs to the temptations of official position?

Mr. White attributes the misgovernment of American cities to the fact that they are considered political bodies instead of corporations, and that the shiftless, illiterate and vicious classes rule at the polls. But vice is not necessarily a property of rags any more than virtue is of a dress suit. I think Mr. Stead gets at the real underlying cause when he says the root of the whole matter lies in the fact that in America religion has not penetrated into the ideal of the community as an organized whole. He explains that by religion he does not mean the shibboleths of dogmatic theologians or creeds, but the conception that wrong is wrong and that right is right; that the great ethical laws which underlie the relations of men to men in their individual capacity also apply to men in their organized municipal and state relations.

This moral failure we can find sure indications of very near at hand. For instance, how many of us are as careful to report all our property to the tax collector as we are to pay our bills at the grocer's, or the debt we owe our next door neighbor? A debt is a debt whether we owe it to one person or sixty million.

Then is it not true that there is a prevalent sentiment that public affairs under municipal or governmental control are not to be conducted on principles of every-day business as between man and man, but that they are to be administered on the principle of partisan patronage for political reward?

Let us not forget that "righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people," and "that happy is the nation whose God is the Lord" of Justice and right. For a sound moral sense and loyalty to the sentiment of justice towards one and all is the only sure foundation of civilized government and civilized life upon this earth.