loot, spoils, and so on. With all due recognition of recent achievements in the way of gathering and presenting evidence, it is lamentably apparent that charges of corruption are still very frequently brought forward, by party men and reformers alike, on slight grounds or no grounds at all, and also that in many of these cases no intention exists of pushing either accusation or defence to a point where a thorough threshing-out of the matter at issue is possible. In "practical politics" insinuations of the blackest character are made jestingly, and they are ignored or passed off with a shrug or a smile, provided only that they be not of too pointed or too personal a character. Very serious evils may follow reckless mudslinging of this sort. Even if the charges are looked upon as the natural and harmless exuberances of our current political warfare, their constant repetition tends to blur the whole popular conception of corruption. Insensibly the conviction gains ground that practices which are asserted to be so common can scarcely be wholly bad, since public life goes on without apparent change and private prosperity seems unaffected. If, on the other hand, the current accusations of corruption are to be taken at anything like their face value, it becomes difficult to avoid the pessimism that sees nothing but rottenness in our social arrangements and despairs of all constructive reform with present materials.

A second verbal point that demands attention

is the metaphorical character of the word corruption. Even when it is distinctly qualified as political or business or social corruption, the suggestion is subtly conveyed of organic corruption and of everything vile and repugnant to the physical senses which the latter implies. It need not be charged that such implications are purposely cultivated: indeed they are so obvious and common that their use by this time has become a matter of habit. Witness in current writing the frequent juxtaposition of the word corruption, used with reference to social phenomena, with such words as slime, filth, sewage, stench, tainted, rottenness, gangrene, pollution, and the frequent comparison of those who are supposed to profit by such corruption to vultures, hyenas, jackals, and so on. Side by side with the levity already criticised we accordingly find a usage which, however exaggerated and rhetorical it may be, appears to indicate a strong popular feeling against what are deemed to be corrupt practices.

Escape from such confusion can hardly come from the accepted formulas of the dictionaries. Their descriptions or periphrases of corruption are in general much too broad for use in exact discussion. Bribery, indeed, is defined with sufficient sharpness by the Century Dictionary as

"a gift or gratuity bestowed for the purpose of influencing the action or conduct of the receiver; especially money or any valuable consideration given or promised for the be

trayal of a trust or the corrupt performance of an allotted duty, as to a fiduciary agent, a judge, legislator or other public officer, a witness, a voter, etc."

Corruption, however, is by no means synonymous with bribery. The latter is narrower, more direct, less subtle. There can be no bribe-taker without a bribe-giver, but corruption can and frequently does exist even when there are no personal tempters or guilty confederates. A legislator may be approached by a person interested in a certain corporation and may be promised a definite reward for his favourable vote on a measure clearly harmful to the public interest but calculated to benefit the corporation concerned. If the bargain be consummated it is unquestionably a case of bribery, and the action involved is also corrupt. But, if current reports are to be believed, it sometimes happens that legislators, acting wholly on their own initiative and regardless of their duty to the state, vote favourably or unfavourably on pending bills, endeavouring at the same time to profit financially by their action, or by their knowledge of the resultant action of the body to which they belong, by speculation in the open market. In the latter instance they have not been approached by a personal tempter, and the brokers whom they employ to buy or sell may be ignorant of the motives or even of the identity of their patrons. Clearly this is not bribery, but equally clearly it is corrupt. The distinction is perhaps sufficiently

auto

important to justify the coinage of the term corruption" to cover cases of the latter sort.1 Corruption in the widest sense of the term would then include both bribery and auto-corruption, and may be defined as the intentional misperformance or neglect of a recognised duty, or the unwarranted exercise of power, with the motive of gaining some advantage more or less directly personal.

2

It will be observed that none of the terms of the foregoing definition necessarily confines corruption to the field of politics. This is intentional. Corruption is quite as possible elsewhere as in the state. That it has so frequently been discussed as peculiarly political is by no means proof that government is subject to it in a greater degree than other social organisations. One might rather conclude that the earlier discovery and more vigorous denunciation of corruption as a political evil showed greater purgative virtue in the state than in other spheres of human activity. For surely the day is gone by when the clamour of reformers was all for

1

1 Other illustrations of auto-corruption may be found in speculation by inside officials on the basis of crop reports not yet made public, and in real-estate deals based on a knowledge of projected public improvements.

2

Misperformance and neglect of duty do not clearly include cases of usurpation with corrupt motives; hence the addition of this clause to the definition. Some usurpations may of course be defended as involving high and unselfish motives, and hence free from corruption.

a

'business administration" of public affairs. Since that era business has had to look sharply to its own morals-in insurance, in public utilities, in railroads, in corporate finance, and elsewhere. Revelations in these fields have made it plain that much of the impetus to wrong-doing in the political sphere comes originally from business interests. This is not to be taken as in any sense exculpating the public officials concerned; it simply indicates the guilt of the business man as particeps criminis with the politician. Moreover business can and does suffer from forms of corruption which are peculiar to itself and which in no way involve political turpitude. Such offences range all the way from the sale by a clerk of business secrets to a rival concern, and the receipt of presents or gratuitous entertainment from wholesalers by the buyers for retail firms, up to the juggling of financial reports by directors, the mismanagement of physical property by insiders who wish to buy out small stockholders, and the investment of insurance or other trust funds to the private advantage of managerial officers.

Besides business and politics, other spheres of social activity are subject to corrupt influences. Indeed wherever and whenever there is duty to be shirked or improperly performed for motives of more or less immediate advantage evil of this sort may enter in. This is the case with the church, the family, with educational associations, clubs,