Now, this
right to arrange the virtues according to a scale of its own, is
something which not only every age, but every nation, has claimed,
and, accordingly, we find that each community, in forming its
judgment of a man's character, gives a different degree of weight to
different features of it. Keeping a mistress would probably,
anywhere in the United States, damage a man's reputation far more
seriously than fraudulent bankruptcy; while horse-stealing, which in
New England would be a comparatively trifling offence, out in
Montana is a far fouler thing than murder. But in the European
scale, honesty still occupies the first place. Bearing this in mind,
it is worth any man's while who proposes to pass judgment on the
morality of any foreign country, to consider what is the impression
produced on foreign opinion about American morality by the story of
the Erie Railroad, by the career of Fisk, by the condition of the
judicial bench in the commercial capital of the country, by the
charges of corruption brought against such men as Trumbull and
Fessenden at the time of the impeachment trial; by the comically
prominent and beloved position which Butler has held for some years
in our best moral circles, and by the condition of the civil
service.
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