the United States there is continually being raised, in
ever increasing volume, the cry for the separation of local and national
politics. It is true that small headway has yet been made towards any
tangible reform; but the desire is there. Again, therefore, it is
curious that in politics, as in so many other things, there are two
currents setting in precisely opposing directions in the two
countries--in America a reaction against corruptions which have crept in
during the season of growth and ferment and an attempt to return to
something of the simplicity of earlier models, and, simultaneously in
England, hardly a danger, but a possibility of sliding into a danger, of
admitting precisely those abuses of which the United States is
endeavouring to purge itself. The tendencies at work are exactly
analogous to those which, as we have seen, are operating to modify the
respective modes of speech of the two peoples. What the ultimate effect
of either force will be, it is impossible even to conjecture. But it is
unpleasant for an Englishman to consider even the remotest possibility
of a time coming, though long after he himself is dead, when the people
of America will draw awful warnings from the corrupt state of politics
in England, and bless themselves that in the United States the municipal
rings which dominate and scourge the great cities in England are
unknown.

At present that time is far distant, and there can be no reasonable
doubt that there is much more corruption in public affairs in the United
States than in England. The possibilities of corruption are greater,
because there are so many more men whose influence or vote may be worth
buying; but it is to be feared that the evil does not exceed merely in
proportion to the excess of opportunity. Granted that bribery and the
use of undue influence are most obvious and most rampant in those
spheres which have not their counterpart in Great Britain--in municipal
wards and precincts, in county conventions and State legislatures--it
still remains that the taint has spread upwards into other regions which
in English politics are pure. There is every reason to think that the
Englishman is justified in his belief that the motives which guide his
public men and the principles which govern his public policy are, on the
whole, higher than those which guide and inspire and govern the men or
policies of any other nation. Bismarck's (if it was Bismarck's)
confidence in the _parole d