ABSTRACT
It is often overlooked that, at the beginning of the 1900s, industrialized countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States of America were deeply corrupt. In the United Kingdom, despite a well-paid, efcient and largely honest civil service, corruption was rampant in almost every other sector. In the private sector, cartels abounded whereby the public quite literally was held to ransom. Political patronage abounded. An editorial in The Times had complained that headmasters were taking bribes from publishers for school text-books. Clergymen were even taking kickbacks on sales of hymn books. In response, anticorruption groups sprang up and these proved to be the trigger for reforms which have helped lay the basis for some of the world’s most successful economies.
