The Impending Conflict

It is a common mistake for a certain class (of professional politicians to suppose, whea the country is ringing with exposures of their corrupt character and denunciation of their misconduot, that their chief enemies are the newspapere, and if they could only silence these public censors the world would accept them as honest men. Whenever, therefore, a popular revolt breaks out againBt the tyranny of thievish rings, the imperiled rogues give their firit attention tó the press. Tweed spent onormous sums of money in sustaining newspaper organs, and every dollar devoted tosuch purposes was wasted, because his subsidized journals neither represented nor influenced any school of opinión. The District of Columbia ring made the same mistake. It bought the control of every newspaper ia Washington excopt one, and all this expenditure could not delay itn fate for an hour. It is just the same with a great many gentlemen in Congress. They have not, indeed, attempted to buy the press, but they are trying to terrify it into silence. They have passed a ]w of libel which exposes every journalist who criticises the conduct of a Congressman to the danger of being haled under arrest in Washington and tried by a court which depends upon Congress for its existence. Under this law editors may be taken trom their offices and arraigned before a packed jury in the District of Columbia for an alleged criminal libol written and printed in New York, in San Francisco, in Maine, in Texas, in Alaska, and never seen perhaps by more than a single person in the National Capital ; for in the eye of the law a libel is published wherever it chancos to circuíate. But Congress will fail just as Tweed and Shepherd did. The press is formidable to these men only so far as it is the representative of .an indignant public ; and Messrs. Carpenter, Conkling and their associates can no more suppress the voice of an angry and outraged community than they can dam up Niágara. With some violence perhaps, with some partisan rancor, with occasional exaggeration and error, and with unnecessary coarseness of invective, the press has nevertheless discharged its duty with substantial honesty and disinterestedness, and the whole country knows it - the whole country except the few men in Washington who are sufforing under the lash of public opinión. Every disinterested observer of affairs can see the signs of a great popular uprising against the corruptions in office, the baseness of political warfare, the scandals of public life, the unholy thirst for gain and the looseness of financial moráis which have so long disgraced us in the eyes of the world. Every sensible man knows that the newspapera have apparently succeeded in disgracing the statesmen of the Credit Mobilier, defeating champions of the back pay, breaking up the District government, abolishing the Jayne and Sanborn scandals, cleaning out the Treasury Department, and exhibiting certain of our leading Senators in their true character, only because the newspapera have been in full accord with the great mass of an honest and right-minded people. The impending conflict is not between Congress and the press, but between official dishonesty and public opinión. The issue of such a struggle can hardly be doubtful ; and yet there are some old women at Washington who think of fighting off the storm with brooms.