Clarksville weekly chronicle. (Clarksville, Tenn.) 1873-1890, 1880-10-09
PUBLIC MEN.


There is no feature in the repudi-
ating movements as now carried on
in Tennessee, so m1schievOus and
demoralizing as its leaders, practice
of heaping up calumny upon the
reputation of our departed leaders
who have built up the state. 1t is
a necessity of their position that
they should cry Fraud fraud 7" at
every stage Of the process by which
Tennessee became a prosperous,
cultivated and civilized community
in the place of an unreclaimed and
unproductive wilderness. AT every
stage of this process increased means
of communication was the primary
and indispensable step to be taken,
first by dirt roads and river i'm
provements, then by turnpikes and
lastly by railroads; and in every
case the credit of the state has been
the one available means for forward
ing this process.
Such enterprise required the adj
vocacy of enlightened men-men of
energy, of foresight, and men whose
characters had gained them the
confidence of the people whom they
led in the enterprise.
What is the result? Tennessee is
one of the most productive states in
the Union. Her cotton, wheat, corn
and tobacco command lucrative
markets everywhere in Europe and
America, and her people are grow
ing rich on the proceeds of her COM
merce. And now she is cOunselled
to look back on the men who have
done all this, on the governors, leg
islators, judges whose wisdom and
patriotism have thus created a great,
powerful and wealthy state out of a
barren wilderness, with what feel
ing? With that sublimated graft
tude and veneration which in for
mer days made demigods and saints
out of the benefactOrs of the human
race? Alas, no; at every step of the
process of advancement and i'm
prOvement, our Savages and Will
sons are teaching men to cry "fraud!
fraudw Governors were bribed by
railroad companies which did not
yet exist; legislatures were bought
up, judges were corrupted, the press
was subsidized in order to make
profit for bond-holders and railroad
companies, for banks and agents,
and the people paid all the money
while the Office-hOlders and capital
lists gained the profits.
Shame on this sordid estimate of
men whose standard of right was
too high, whose generous impulses
were too broad and expansive for
these sciolists and political quacks
to comprehend! If they were to
succeed in impreSsing their base and
grovelling notions on our people,
we should sink into the quagmire
of political inaction and business
stagnatiOn. No one would come to
the front in advocacy of healthful
enterprise because the doing so
would mark a man out for detrac-
ton and calumny. The nation which
fails to appreciate its great men will
soon have no great men to appreci-
ate. 1t was a symptom of national
decline which preceded the fall of
Athens by a very few years, when
a law was passed that public officers
should be chosen by lot because |
election of them so often placed cor
rupt men in office. Such a law only |
demonstrated the despair of the |
Athenians of finding men great and /
good enough to deserve their suf- !
frage and the Athenians deserved |
such lot, for when they had great
men, the almost certain result of
greatness was OStrdciSDl' Danish
ment, i'm short, for no other reason
but that their eminence rendered
them dangerous to the republic.
1t is not only a base and democrat
izing opinion, but an utterly false
one, which holds that public life
has tendency TO corrupt and per-
vert mems moral nature. We be-
Iieve the reverse to be strictly true,
that the conspicuous publicity of
life has a tendency to rem
Ter men circumspeet and careful in
their moral conduct to a degree TO
which they might not have attained
in a private station. The very con-
sciOusness that a man has obtained
the confidence of a large number OF
his fellow-citizens constitutes a mo-
i've for continuing to deserve 1t,