‘abundant suspicions,’ ‘abundant accusations,’ but few of these ‘have been, or could have been, sifted to the bottom.’ ‘The opportunities for private gain are large, the chances of detection small.’ All that can be safely said is, that personal dishonesty in the exercise of legislative powers, of a kind quite distinct from the political profligacy with which we are in our own country abundantly familiar, prevails largely and unquestionably in America. It is especially prominent in what we should call private Bills affecting the interests of railroads or of other wealthy corporations, and in Bills altering the tariff of imports, on which a vast range of manufacturing interests largely depend. ‘The doors of Congress are besieged by a whole army of commercial and railroad men and their agents, to whom, since they have come to form a sort of profession, the name of Lobbyists is given. Many Congressmen are personally interested, and lobby for themselves among their colleagues from the vantage-ground of their official positions.’
The object of the lobbyist is to ‘offer considerations for help in passing a Bill which is desired, or stopping a Bill which is feared.’ There are several different methods. There is ‘log-rolling,’ when members interested in different private Bills come to an agreement that each will support the Bill of the others on condition of himself receiving the same assistance. There is the ‘strike,’ which means that ‘a member brings in a Bill directed against some railroad or other great corporation merely in order to levy blackmail upon it.… An eminent railroad president told me that for some years a certain senator regularly practised this trick.’ ‘It is universally admitted that the Capitol and the hotels of Washington are a nest of such intrigues and machinations while Congress is sitting.’ The principal method, however, of succeeding seems to be simple bribery, though ‘no one can tell how many of the members are tainted/Sometimes the money does not go to the member of Congress, but to the boss who controls him. Sometimes a Lobbyist receives money to bribe an honest member, but, finding he is going to vote in the way desired, keeps it in his own pocket. Often members are bribed to support a railway by a transfer of portions of its stocks. Free passes were so largely given with the same object to legislators that an Act was passed in 1887 to forbid them. Mr. Bryce mentions a governor who used to obtain loans of money from the railway which traversed his territory under the promise that he would use his constitutional powers in its favour; and members of Congress were accustomed to buy, or try to buy, land belonging to a railway company at less than the market price, in consideration of the services they could render to the line in the House. It was clearly shown that, in one case within the last twenty years, a large portion of a sum of $4,818,000, which was expended by a single railway, was used for the purpose ‘of influencing legislation.’ The letters of the director who managed the case of this railway have been published, and show that he found members of both Houses fully amenable to corruption. ‘I think,’ writes this gentleman in 1878, ‘in all the world's history, never before was such a wild set of demagogues honoured by the name of Congress.’
It is, of course, inevitable that only a small proportion of transactions of this kind should be disclosed. These cases are merely samples, probably representing many others. A great additional amount of direct corruption is connected with the enormous distribution of patronage in the hands of members of Congress. There are about 120,000 Federal Civil Service places, and an important part of each member's business is to distribute such places among his constituents. It is easy to imagine how such patronage would be administered by such men as have been described.
Mr. Bryce, however, is of opinion that there is much prevalent exaggeration about American corruption, and that Europeans are very unduly shocked by it. This is partly the fault of Americans, who have ‘an airy way of talking about their own country,’ and love ‘broad effects.’ It is partly, also, due to the malevolence of European travellers, ‘who, generally belonging to the wealthier class, are generally reactionary in politics,’ and therefore not favourable to democratic government. Englishmen, he thinks, are very unphilosophical. They have ‘a useful knack of forgetting their own shortcomings when contemplating those of their neighbours.’ ‘Derelictions of duty which a man thinks trivial in the form with which custom has made him familiar in his own country, where, perhaps, they are matter for merriment, shock him when they appear in a different form in another country. They get mixed up in his mind with venality, and are cited to prove that the country is corrupt and its politicians profligate.’ In the proceedings of Congress, Mr. Bryce says, ‘it does not seem, from what one hears on the spot, that money is often given, or, I should rather say, it seems that the men to whom it is given are few in number. But considerations of some kind pretty often pass.’ In other words, not actual money, but the value of money, and jobs by which money can be got, are usually employed.
Senators are often charged with ‘buying themselves into the Senate,’ but Mr. Bryce does not think that they often give direct bribes to the members of the State legislature to vote for them. They only make large contributions to the party election fund, out of which the election expenses of the majority are defrayed.79 Bribery exists in Congress, but is confined to a few members, say 5 per cent. of the whole number. … The taking of other considerations than money, such as a share in a lucrative contract, or a railway pass, or a “good thing” to be secured for a friend, prevails among legislators to a somewhat larger extent.… One may roughly conjecture that from 15 to 20 per cent. of the members of Congress, or of an average State legislature, would allow themselves to be influenced by inducements of this kind.… Jobbery of various kinds, i.e. the misuse of a public position for the benefit of individuals, is pretty frequent. It is often disguised as a desire to render some service to the party; and the same excuse is sometimes found for a misappropriation of public money. Patronage is usually dispensed with a view of party considerations or to win personal support. But this remark is equally true of England and France, the chief difference being that, owing to the short terms and frequent removals, the quantity of patronage is relatively greater in the United States.’
On the whole, Mr. Bryce concludes, if ‘we leave ideals out of sight, and try America by an actual standard, we shall find that while the legislative bodies fall below the level of purity maintained in England and Germany, probably also in France and Italy, her Federal and State Administration, in spite of the evils flowing from an uncertain tenure, is not, in point of integrity, at this moment sensibly inferior to the Administrations of European countries.’80
This judgment certainly does not err on the side of severity. If in England a great admirer of our parliamentary institutions, while boasting that no Prime Minister had been seriously charged with pecuniary corruption, and that no Cabinet Minister had been known for the last forty years to have taken money as a bribe, was obliged to add that several Cabinet Ministers of both parties in the State were suspected of complicity in railroad jobs and frauds on the revenue; that the whole of that vast department of legislation which affects the interest of corporations and manufacturers was systematically managed, or at least influenced, by corruption; that about 5 per cent. of the members of both Houses of Parliament were accustomed to take direct money bribes; that one in every five or six members was pretty certainly open to corrupt jobs, while suspicion of dishonesty of some kind attached to a much larger number, we should scarcely, I think, consider our parliamentary government a success.
Many of the causes of the vices of American government are inherent in democracy, but there are two aggravating causes which I have not mentioned. The rule that the person elected to either House of Congress must be a resident in the State for which he sits abridges greatly the choice of able and efficient men, and much strengthens the power of the local machine; while the large salaries attached to the position of senator or representative make it—even apart from its many indirect advantages—an object of keen ambition to the professional politician. Members of each House have a salary of 1,000l. a year, besides some small allowance for travelling and other expenses. In 1873, the two Houses passed an Act increasing many official salaries and adding a third to their own salaries, and, by a curiously characteristic provision, the congressional salaries, and these alone, were made retroactive. The appropriation, however, by Congress of nearly 40,000l. to itself excited so much indignation that it was repealed in the next Congress.81
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