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Good Citizenship

Good Citizenship image
Parent Issue
Day
23
Month
October
Year
1903
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

GOOD CITIZENSHIP

The address of ex-President Cleveland before the Commercial club of Chicago on good citizenship of the positive and active kind, that kind of citizenship which participates in public affairs from patriotic motives and is disinterested in so far as making profit out of such participation, appears to have pleased the people generally who have read it. The statement that our government was made for and is suited to "a patriotic, unselfish and sober-minded people" and is wholly unfitted to a selfish and corrupt people is true as gospel. Ours is a government dead easy to work in the interest of corrupt schemes and ends, if the people are so inclined, and it is sure to be venal and corrupt in proportion as the people are lacking in virtue and unintelligent. The great trouble with our government today is that it has fallen into the hands, in large measure, of the selfish who do not hesitate to use it for corrupt ends, in fact organized dishonesty is in the saddle and evasion and violation of law and law making in the interest of the rankest kind of selfishness and for personal gain are too much the order.

The ex-president urged upon good citizens a crusade to recover the land from the spoilsmen. He laid down the following outline of a creed for these crusaders:

This creed should teach the wickedness of attempting to make free opportunity the occasion for seizing especial advantages and should warn against the danger of ruthless rapacity. It should deprecate ostentation and extravagance in the life of our people and demand in the management of public affairs simplicity and strict economy. It should teach toleration in all things, save dishonesty and infidelity to public trusts. It should uphold the interests of labor and advocate its fair treatment, but should sternly forbid its interference with those contented with their toil and its attempts to force compliance with its demands by violent disturbances of peace and good order. It should recognize in the wide distribution of capital and industrial enterprise the best assurance of intelligent, wholesomely interested, political conduct, and should condemn unnecessary, unnatural and speculative combinations in trade or enterprise, as teaching false business lessons and putting our consumers at their mercy. It should insist that our finances and currency concern not alone the large traders, merchants and bankers of our land, but that they are intimately and every day related to the well-being of our people in all conditions of life, and that, therefore, if any adjustments are necessary, they should be made in such manner as shall certainly maintain the soundness of our people's earnings and the security of their savings. It should enjoin respect for the law as the quality that cements the fabric of organized society and makes possible a government by the people.

There is now said to be a probability of the senate passing the Cuban reciprocity treaty at the approaching special session. Still no one can tell what selfish thing may be dragged into the matter before the meeting of congress or during the discussion of the treaty which will prevent its being enacted. Nothing is more certain, in spite of the laws that have been passed relating to reciprocity treaties, that congress is against such treaties. Commissions and commissions have been appointed under congressional enactments to negotiate reciprocity treaties, and when those treaties reach the senate congress is too selfish to consider such any real reciprocity measure. The delay in this Cuban matter and the grinding manner in which the whole matter has been handled has practically alienated the good feeling in Cuba toward the United States and led the Cuban people to turn more and more to the nations of Europe in all trade matters. All this could easily have been prevented had congress been willing to simply redeem the pledged faith of the nation.