New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1874-09-29
RETAINERS AND BRIBES-THE DIFFER
ENCE.


Between a retainer and bride the line is
very shadowy and dim. Only sensitive con-
science, utter sincerity of purpose, and the
loftiest unsefishness can separate them clearly,
making the division positive and pronounced.
Wherever the moral sense has been in any
degree blurred by the adoption of the stand
ards of commercial or political morality;
wherever, indeed, the sense has been dulled
by simply such contact with the methods of
politics or business as breeds familiarity, there
you will find the separation between retainer
and bride q merest haze of shading off that
stops nowhere this side of a crossed palm and
fee. In the progress we have been making
in the science of government and the philoso-
ply of legislation during these later years, we
seem almost to have reached the point where
the crime of bribery is impossible. The
process of retaining attorneys laps over and
conceals it. No one is bribed. Everybody is
retained" There have been charges, fire.
quent and pronounced, against men in public
life in which the offense was bribery and the
proof to an ordinary mind clear and con-
clusive; but invariably the cloak of "legiti-
innate professional business has been drawn
over the transactions, and what the simple
minded have been prone to set down as brides
have passed into history and into the chem
istry of political morals as general retainers."
The Louisiana developments have only turned
another leaf in the history Of progress in this
direction. Members of Congress who were
called upon in their official capacity to vote
and act in the complicated Louisiana matters
are found to have been retained" In the case
by Mr.. Kellogg, who claimed to be Governor,
and upon whose claim, directly OF indirectly,
| Congress was to decide. Retained not of
course in the matters immediately pending
before Congressional would be too broad
but in cases before the United States Supreme
Court involving precisely the same questions,
and so nearly identical that to be on one side
of the case before the Court carried the advo-
cate by the logic of his own reasoning to the
| same side of the question before Congress.
| No bribery in this, to be sure-far be it from
us to intimate such thing but we take
leave to say that the men who accept fees as
advocates in political case before the Su-
preme Court, and are able to act impartially and
without prejudice or bias when the same case
comes before them in the exercise of their func-
tons as legislators are extremely rare. The Drac
tice has grown to such proportions within the
| past ten or twelve years that unprofessiOnal
men who happen to be in the Legislature Or
in Congress have begun to exercise the priv
ileges of the profession, and through the
bungling of some of them the whole business
has been badly botched. The ordinary mind
becomes confused with the strange mixing up
of private business with public concerns OF
professional fee-taking with official law
making. When Mr.. Butler appears as the
retained counsel and attorney for the Credit
Mobilier statesmen, or for moiety spies and
informers, or for Treasury contractor; when
| In all these matters he is called upon in his
official position to act in judicial capacity
as between the people whom he represents
and the clients by whom he is retained, no
one-certainly no one in COngress-seems
shocked or even surprised at it. The "forty-
'iackass mud throwing power" of the press
may comment upon it in a spirit of unkind-
ness, but that is all. Congress does not
mind it.
Mr. VIM. f. Chandler, the Secretary of the
Republican National Executive Committee, who
is the organizer of victory and the managing
man Of the party, receives retainers from per-
sons like Kellogg, who wish TO use the Repub-
lican party to fortify themselves in usurped
power and defend their crimes. Mr.. Chandler
has no Office, but he is in confidential posi-
ton in his party. One might suppose he
would have some delicacy about taking fees in
such political question ~ this of the Kellogg