Cause of Corrupt Government; C. Manion

This role of government as the enemy of liberty was [334 ] well understood by the Founding Fathers of the Republic. They wished government to have sufficient power to ('re_ strain men from injuring one another." But beyond that, they tied it down securely with constitutional limitations, separation of powers, bills of rights, and other legal bar riers and barbed wire entanglements. When somebody asked James Madison, the father of the Constitution, how such a crippled and restricted government could be ex pected to function, he replied: "But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary." And he further stated that our government is based on "the capacity of mankind for self-government"-in other words, upon the ability of each man to control and govern him self according to the commandments of his Creator. As men lose the power and the desire for self-control and self reliance under God, government moves in to take up the slack. One hundred years before the Declaration of Inde pendence was written, William Penn anticipated the fore going conclusions of the Founding Fathers when he said that the people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants. This was true in Penn's time, and it is true in our own time. The growth of government evidences the shrinkage of the American people in their capacity and in their desire to control and govern themselves.

A swelling is one of the infallible signs of a sickness underneath, and the swelling of government in America today merely evidences the moral sickness of the people under it. Big government is for little people. The better the people, the less necessity there is for government. This [335 ] simple, vicarious relationship between the citizen and his government is obscured today in the fog of our confused political councils. It is unfortunate that we regard the growth of government as "progressive liberalism" and the so-called· "natural evolution of the democratic process." This is the great error that has fabricated the fog which causes our confusion. This is the error that interrupts the peaceful process of American production and confounds our purpose· in fighting the Communists at home and abroad. We cannot defeat communism abroad by the simple de vice of giving government more and more power at home.

Remember that communism is merely the climax of des potic governmental power; and as the concentration of the powers of our own government becomes greater and greater, we rapidly take on the likeness of the enemy we are trying to defeat. In this process, we are not defeating communism; we are rather surrendering to it. Government is no longer contained behind the walls of the Constitution. It roams where it pleases, throughout every walk of life and throughout every department of business. From workers to wages to materials to products, the government is everywhere. We no longer have a gov.. ernment of laws; we have government by 100,000 roving all-powerful agents of government. In sheer desperation, the American citizen now tries to appease these representa .. tives of government with blandishments-sometimes with bribes and corruption. Governmental corruption is not the fault of the administration nor of any man nor group of men in government. Governmental corruption is a neces[336 ] sary consequence of the unreasonable, unconstitutional, and scandalous concentration of power which Woodrow Wilson warned us about 40 years ago. Unless this scandal ous concentration of power is dissolved, corruption will not only continue, it will grow worse-and this regardless of the political complexion or personal honesty of the President of the United States.

[ 337] EQUALITY AND SECURITY tLJ ;Dean RUddell IT WAS June of 1934when I left the orphanage where I was reared-the Odd Fellows Home in Lynchburg, Virginia. In July of 1951, I was invited to return as the speaker at a Home-Coming Day celebration the following September. As I considered whether or not to accept the invitation, my thoughts wandered back to the place where I had lived until I was eighteen. My memories of milking the cows on cold mornings when I wanted to stay in bed were not so pleasant. But my memories of the smell of fresh earth as it was turned by the plow-and of walking barefooted in the furrow-were most pleasant. There was threshing time with its heat and dirt and dust, but there were also baseball and chapel and the library. That wonderful library I I wondered if my Horatio Alger favorites were still there: Do and Dare, Work and Win, Ragged Dick, Strive and Succeed, and many others of the same general nature. Those are the once-popular novels for children that tell of an America where the poor boy from the other side of the railroad tracks could become the president of the bank, where the penniless orphan could become a great scientist, where there was no legal nor tra ditional caste system to hold a person back, where virtue [338 ] was its own reward, and things of that general nature.