Читать книгу Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World - Clifton R. Wooldridge - Страница 41

It was a rhetorical and sensational sentence in which a recent speaker in this city declared that the worst grafter is the man who does not vote. But there is much more than a kernel of truth in the words. The citizens of a republic need constant stimulus to the fulfillment of the plainest duties of life. The better the working of the machinery of government, the less the average man is affected. He rarely feels the pressure of taxation. He lives in a generation from which no military service is demanded. He is permitted freedom of thought, speech and religion, and almost insensibly, as a result, he loses sight of the supreme obligation which is due his country. He forgets that that country, in time of public stress, may demand his time, his property and his life, drafting him for its armies if he does not wish to volunteer, governing him under martial law, which sets aside the usual privileges accorded him, and exercising over him, if need be, a tyranny ordinarily associated with despotism among the older peoples.

The very fact that the American citizen does not often feel the exercise of the sovereign power, and is not called upon to pay the supreme obligation of service, makes him careless of his civic duties, when, it might be thought, he would feel the utmost gratitude for the privilege of living under such favoring conditions. This carelessness becomes chronic, and there is abundant need for the constant reiteration of the call to duty. If, then, a citizen is content to enjoy the comforts and the quiet of American life without rendering any return therefor, he may justly be called a grafter, and a grafter of that worst sort, who robs his benefactor. For, with duty faithfully performed by the citizen, public opinion is readily shaped, laws quickly secure enforcement, and public servants are kept clean and true. It all comes back at last to the individual citizen, upon whom must rest the responsibility for failure or success of government. It is easy enough to cry out against the grafter in official position who puts his hand into the public treasury. Perhaps, after all, the worst offender is the citizen who does not vote, who does not take a lively interest in the selection and election of his rulers, who fails to recognize the underlying obligation of service which his country has a just right to demand of him.