If there is nothing to conceal, then why conceal it?  If it is a public game, why play it in private?  If it is a public game, then why not come out into the open and play it in public?  You have got to cure diseased politics as we nowadays cure tuberculosis, by making all the people who suffer from it live out of doors; not only spend their days out of doors and walk around, but sleep out of doors; always remain in the open, where they will be accessible to fresh, nourishing, and revivifying influences.

I, for one, have the conviction that government ought to be all outside and no inside.  I, for my part, believe that there ought to be no place where anything can be done that everybody does not know about.  It would be very inconvenient for some gentlemen, probably, if government were all outside, but we have consulted their susceptibilities too long already.  It is barely possible that some of these gentlemen are unjustly suspected; in that case they owe it to themselves to come out and operate in the light.  The very fact that so much in politics is done in the dark, behind closed doors, promotes suspicion.  Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.  So, our honest politicians and our honorable corporation heads owe it to their reputations to bring their activities out into the open.

At any rate, whether they like it or not, these affairs are going to be dragged into the open.  We are more anxious about their reputations than they are themselves.  We are too solicitous for their morals,—­if they are not,—­to permit them longer to continue subject to the temptations of secrecy.  You know there is temptation in loneliness and secrecy.  Haven’t you experienced it?  I have.  We are never so proper in our conduct as when everybody can look and see exactly what we are doing.  If you are off in some distant part of the world and suppose that nobody who lives within a mile of your home is anywhere around, there are times when you adjourn your ordinary standards.  You say to yourself:  “Well, I’ll have a fling this time; nobody will know anything about it.”  If you were on the desert of Sahara, you would feel that you might permit yourself,—­well, say, some slight latitude in conduct; but if you saw one of your immediate neighbors coming the other way on a camel,—­you would behave yourself until he got out of sight.  The most dangerous thing in the world is to get off where nobody knows you.  I advise you to stay around among the neighbors, and then you may keep out of jail.  That is the only way some of us can keep out of jail.

Publicity is one of the purifying elements of politics.  The best thing that you can do with anything that is crooked is to lift it up where people can see that it is crooked, and then it will either straighten itself out or disappear.  Nothing checks all the bad practices of politics like public exposure.  You can’t be crooked in the light.  I don’t know whether it has ever been tried or not; but I venture to say, purely from observation, that it can’t be done.