OCR Text |
Show Editorial: KICIIT OR WRONG THERE'S A DIFFERENCE In every neighborhood most of the people know the difference between right and wrong. The great majority can always distinguish the one from the other, whether the question concerns property or propriety. pro-priety. The sense of deceny runs deep. Because right and decency provide the best and easiest rules to live by, they prevail in most families and in most communities. Because they pay, they prevail pre-vail in most business activities. Why, then, does it seem to have become difficult for some of the people in government to tell right from wrong? Has the atmosphere of public affairs changed to too much that a lower standard of behavior beha-vior is accepted? A long list of incidents, large and small, prompts Americans to ask such questions. A civilian engineer in a Detroit arsenal protested against the plain waste of public money he saw before his eyes. He was told that if he talked too much he could lose his job. He had the courage to resign. The general in charge of the arsenal was relieved, after charges that he accepted too much hospitality from suppliers, and that he used military transportation transporta-tion for private purposes. A southern former governor resigned from a Federal agency. He said he could not collect a salary from the taxpayers when for weeks he had been given absolutely nothing to do. While the public was being warned against hoarding, hoard-ing, a government agency was found to have stored away 1,100 desks for future use. An official testified that he had been advised to "stock-pile" stenographers to put them on the payroll without duties, in case they might be needed later. A new barracks was built on a Utah army property, prop-erty, complete with copper plumbing and other scarce equipment, for less than a month's use. The old barracks bar-racks on the property could have been repaired at small cost. Gifts of mink coats and freezers appear in the news. Questionable influences are reported in Reconstruction Recon-struction Finance Corporation loans. The president mildly comments that there seems to be "nothing illegal." These random incidents may be trivial. Yet such things as these and others have prompted Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois to propose that Congress should establish a code of ethics for government officials. of-ficials. To this suggestion Secretary of Commerce Chas. Sawyer, one of the cabinet's few qualified members, has sagely replied: "Any man who has to look up his code of ethics to find out what is proper or improper is too innocent to be around Washington." Secretary Sawyer evidently thinks that the difference between light and wrong ought to be the same in Washington as anywhere else. Our public servants these days handle billions of other people's money. Misuse of a single dollar or penney is bad enough. Far worse is to develop an atmosphere that encourages en-courages waste and tolerates indifference. The moral fabric of a nation can be stained and weakened by bad examples at the top. Who can say that this is not taking tak-ing place? Government will be no better than the men who are entrusted with its duties. The nien will be no better than those the people choose. The bigger government gov-ernment grows, the greater the need to choose public servants who practice the same kind of right and decency that we expect from our neighbors. |