The Square Truth

Washington is all a wallow of thievery ■ and conuption, with a full sprinkling of delighted official sambos intermixed by way of flavor and ornamentation. Yet the city is jnst as it has long been. TI-ere is really nothiug uew. Only time (reneral!v develops to the many what was well known tO the few. That there is a great gape and .tere over Belkiiap.while there is nothing in le Hul story is that of the hole civü service ever since Grant came It Jn8t what we knew abont, and went m to reform in 1872. AU the thanks we fcOt was a shower of brickbats. There is no place for an honest man C Washington society as at present constituted. No man wlio speaks the trnth can appear in it. If you can 't mee thieves and liars on terms of eqwality, you do not belong there. Moral and political debauchery has here reached a heiglit that history sometimes speaks' of, but of which this country has never before had any experienoe or even any approach to, except in the local sphere where Tweed figured. But the scoundrles who have usurped the name, organization, and administration of the republican party, have beaten all their predecessors in this line out of sight. Fire and brimstone might have done for Sodom, but it wouldn t purify this city. Don't flattor yourself that everything is bound to come out now in either the war or the oiher departments, where things are worse. As af ter great burglaries we hoar of new fastenings, chronometer locks, fresh guards and combinations, so now there are new grips, and and nuw padlocks on every fellow's mouth who might be tempted to teil what he knows. Grant's reported saying that Marsh ought to be hanged for blabbing is understood exactly. Stone walls and iron bolts are nothing to the moral defences set up in this siagle expression of the head of the government. Any chap who has got information to sell can get moro for it at the executive departments to-day Üian in any other market. So yon had better moderate your expectations.