III CORRUPTION: A PERSISTENT PROBLEM OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL LIFE In its broadest significance, corruption has been 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." Evil of this sort may occur not only in the state, but also in the church, the family, in business associations, and every other kind of social body. One may infer from the nature of corruption itself that if developed to an extreme degree it will cause the dissolution of any organisation affected by it. Every social body requires as a prime condition of its existence a certain subordination of individual interest to the general interest. Corruption essentially means the preference of the former to the latter. If self-interest continuously grows more potent while group interest pari passu declines, evidently the social organisation so affected will weaken and finally die. "The king by judgment establisheth the land: but he that receiveth gifts overthroweth it." Universally triumphant corruption, therefore, would destroy the body from which it had drawn the sustenance for its own parasitic life. Anarchy would be far preferable to the extreme logical consequences of corruption. For anarchy seeks to destroy only the compulsory political forms of human society, leaving men free to associate voluntarily in all other ways, whereas ultimate corruption would loosen every social bond and reduce humanity to the state of nature as Hobbes conceived it:-bellum omnium contra omnes. Corruption, then, is a social disease that may terminate fatally. Social death does not always occur because of it, but from the social point of view it is always a pathological condition. Few of the great tragedies of history involving the fall of nations or of mighty institutions can be explained fully without reference to the antecedent corroding influence of corruption. It had a part in the decline of Greece and Rome, in the Protestant Reformation, the overthrow of the Stuart dynasty in England, the partition of Poland, and the French Revolution. Other causes contributed to these events and were perhaps more largely instrumental in bringing them about,-ignorance, inefficiency, tyranny, immorality, extravagance, and obstinacy, but in each instance corruption was also present on a large scale. Even in cases of historical catastrophes where the crushing force was applied from the outside it is usually possible to discern how the victor's path was smoothed by the disintegrating effect of corruption upon the |