While The Avenues To Distinction In Public Life Are In Great Measure
Closed Against Men Of Honour, Wealth Offers A Sure Road To Eminence, And
The Acquisition Of It Is The Great Object Followed.
It is often sought and
obtained by means from which considerations of honesty and morality are
omitted; but there
Is not, as with us, that righteous censorship of public
opinion which brands dishonesty with infamy, and places the offender
apart, in a splendid leprosy, from the society to which he hoped wealth
would be a passport. If you listen to the conversation in cars,
steamboats, and hotels, you become painfully impressed with the absence of
moral truth which pervades the country. The success of Barnum, the immense
popularity of his infamous autobiography, and the pride which large
numbers feel in his success, instance the perverted moral sense which is
very much the result of the absence of principle in public life; for the
example of men in the highest positions in a state must influence the
masses powerfully either for good or evil. A species of moral obliquity
pervades a large class of the community, by which the individuals
composing it are prevented from discerning between truth and falsehood,
except as either tends to their own personal aggrandisement. Thus truth is
at a fearful discount, and men exult in successful roguery, as though a
new revelation had authorised them to rank it among the cardinal virtues.
These remarks apply to a class, unfortunately a very numerous one, of the
existence of which none are more painfully conscious than the good among
the Americans themselves.
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