| OCR Text |
Show THE "SLUSH FUND." Politics in Paris is frequently disfigured disfig-ured hy ecaiblals big and little. The reason is that all political roads in .Prance lead to Paris. The government is highly centralized, controlling the cities and other political subdivisions. With us politics is divided into many parts, beeauso each sta.te is autonomous and the cities have homo rule. In a word, all that ia politically vicious centers cen-ters in Paris; with us it is scattered j throughout the country. j No form of government is free from j political corruption, as has been dem- onstrated by the rottenness in Russia i and by the notorious Camarilla un- masked a few years ago in Berlin by Alaxiniilian Harden. In republics all men have- a prescriptive right to dabble in politics and scandals are many. In autocracies the rottenness may be con-coaled con-coaled for years, as in Russia, where officials, high and low, bartered for bribes and even sold out their country to Germany without being exposed to public execration. Witii ihe revolution came exposure and recently a war minister under the czar was sentenced to life imprisonment as a traitor who had betrayed the country to the enemy in war time. Advocates of autocracy are sometimes wont to boast that politics are cleaner in monarchies than in republics. It depends de-pends largely upon the meaning given to the word politics. In tho usual sense there is not much politics in an autocracy. au-tocracy. Whatever there is is confined to a few. In a state where all officials offi-cials aro appointed by the prince there is no need to bribe the voters for the very good reason that tjiere are no voters. But the boasts of autocracies are usually hollow and the world now has ample proof that despotism can be more corrupt by far than popular government. gov-ernment. The disclosures of the Von Bernstorff ''slush fund" have revealed to us how autocracies operate. Von Bernstorff had hoped that his operations would continue a secret through the war and afterward, but the exigencies of war made it advantageous for the United States to discover the plots of the enemy ene-my and our secret service has been able to lay bare some of the corruption of despotism. We may be sure that what has been discovered is but a small part of tho mass of corruption with which Germany has tried to permeate the world. When Von Bernstorff requested his government to give him $1,700,000 to be used as a bribery fund in Paris there could not- have been much surprise in Berlin, for German money ha3 had a part iu many of the Prench political scandals. In Petrograd, too, German money was circulated in the channels of bribery. Thus does autocracy fight its battles. When all the world is at peace it spends its money to sow tho seeds of discord among its possible enemies. This is a form of preparedness which free countries are loth to adopt and our own government can boast that we have never spent government money to corrupt cor-rupt foreign governments. The principal newspapers of Paris have a more potent influence in politics poli-tics than any of the newspapers of this country or even of England. The Parisian Pa-risian journals circulate extensively all over France. As soon as they become be-come popular their circulation soars 1 toward the million mark and often passes it. Understanding the Pnrisian political situation. Von Bernstorff was impressed by the proposals of Bolo Pasha. He saw that if ho could control an important impor-tant newspaper in Pari? by subsidising it with a vasr sum which would enable it to prosper he would be able to exert a. powerful influence throughout France for the particular object his government govern-ment desired to accomplish. That object ob-ject was the arousing of peace sentiment senti-ment among The French people. Various Va-rious newspapers in Faris have been ad-oa ad-oa t ini: immediate peace, involving French surrender, and it is likely that more than one of them shared in the Von Bernstorff "slush fund,'' or in other German funds. What effect the expenditure of German Ger-man gold has iuid in France in the last " year is not wholly manifest. Undoubt- idly tho paid journals have had some influence. From time to time we have caught hints of a rising peace sentiment senti-ment here and tin-re among the French people. A certain faction of Socialists iu tho chamber of deputies became more and more vocal and they were supported support-ed by deputies of other parties. But on the whole the German propaganda was a failure. The French spirit remained unbroken. The will to victory was virtually vir-tually as si rong as ever. A nd when the United States wont into the war there was such a revival of confidence among the French pi-oplc that t lie influence in-fluence of tho Teuton propaganda was rendered almost nugatory in an instant. |
