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THE FOLLIES OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY
ABOLISHING THE STATE LEGISLATURE
WHAT AMERICAN STATE will be the first to abolish its Legislature? At least 20 States have already gone halfway—by introducing, in some form or other, the checks of the initiative and referendum—but not one has yet gone, as the poet hath it, the whole hog. That very thing, however, is bound to be done some day, and perhaps it will be done in the near future. The American people, after more than a century of bitter experience, are beginning to see the light. They now realize that the Legislature in the State, like the City Council in the city, is inevitably the headquarters of all governmental incompetence, stupidity and corruption. An honest Legislature is as rare as a modest actor. Here in Maryland we have not had four in 80 years. And an intelligent Legislature is rarer still.
Not, of course, that every lawmaker is necessarily a rascal. Our system of choosing Legislators and Councilmen gives enormous advantage to those aspirants who happen to be rascals, and the next most noticeable advantages to those who happen to be jackasses, but all the same not a few honest and intelligent men are returned at every election. It must be apparent, however, that such men are nearly always in the minority and that, in consequence, their influence for good is much less powerful than it ought to be. The normal Legislators, like the normal Councilman, remains a fellow of low intelligence and barroom morals. It is only fear that keeps him on the track—fear of his decenter colleagues, of the newspapers, of public indignation, of the penitentiary. Whenever the chance offers to turn a trick, safely and to his profit, he is sure to turn that trick.
There is scarcely need, at this late day, to attempt to show why this is so—why it must always be so. We all know how Legislators and Councilmen are commonly chosen—how it happens that they represent, not the people of their districts, but the professional politicians of their districts—how their training makes it practically impossible for them to regard public service save as a game of grab—how, once they are in office, they quickly yield to the double influence of the bribers who offer them money and the bosses who threaten them with extinction.
The trouble with the average Legislator is not that he is essentially dishonest, but that he is essentially stupid. Representing a small group of electors, he is himself small—a neighborhood notable—a paddler in a little puddle. This rule, of course, is not invariable; like all other generalizations it falls down before exceptional facts. Men of broad intelligence, of large vision, are sometimes candidates for the Legislature, and now and then they are actually elected. But it must be plain that three times out of four the man who aspires to any such lowly and ill-rewarded office is a dwarf. He can understand, perhaps, the needs of his own little mudpuddle, and he may even make a sincere effort to serve those needs, but when it comes to the needs of other mudpuddles he is not interested, and when it comes to the needs of the State as a whole, or of any large section of it, he is unable to grasp them and utterly disinclined to make the attempt.
This explains the sordid drama that is played out at Annapolis at every session of the Legislature. Country legislators, reaching the State capital with their pockets full of local bills, put through those bills—and then lay back and watch the show. Soon there is something going on in each of 10 rings. The city of Baltimore is in conflict with its professional politicians or with half a dozen piratical corporations. A dozen other corporations, menaced by bellringers, roar and sweat blood. The country solon1 cannot understand half of these combats—but in every one his vote will count. So he is approached, tempted, won over. The bait used may be nothing more poisonous than the flattery of some “big” politician. Again it may be cash in hand. But whatever it is—whether the lawmaker himself is paid for his vote directly or his vote is delivered for ready money by some professional manipulator who acquires control of it by promises or threats—the fact remains that a vote has been influenced by corrupt means.
Not every countryman is open to such approaches—nor every city man. But there are always enough fools and rascals in the crowd to make the game worth while. Six votes may be enough to deliver the goods—and it is always possible to buy the six votes.
The same thing happens in City Councils. The average Councilman in the average American city is, if anything, a more stupid and venal man than the average Legislator. He is, speaking generally, either a ward boss himself or the disgusting slave of a ward boss—and the aim of a ward boss, it must be plain, is not to work for the city’s good, but to work for his own good. In most cases he pursues politics as a trade. It is his only means of livelihood. Therefore, it is not astonishing that he should fall with alacrity upon every opportunity to turn his influence into cash. To ask him to neglect or spurn such opportunities would be, indeed, to question his sanity.
The remedy for all this, of course, is plain. Get rid of your small and purchasable men and you will get rid of bribery. But how are you going to get rid of them? By abolishing Legislatures, City Councils and all other such asylums of the ignorant and corrupt. But laws must be made! Some one must run the city and State! Well, why not hire a few first-rate men to do that work—and then watch those men?
That plan, in various forms, has been actually tried by various American cities—and always with great success. In some cities, such as Baltimore, for example, the City Council has been deprived of the absolute power which once made it a cesspool of corruption, and a small and efficient Board of Estimates now does most of its old work. In other cities—nearly 150 of them—the Council has been abolished altogether, and a board of three or four men has taken its place. Membership upon such boards is attractive to first-rate men—men who would not think of entering a City Council. And the people, watching three or four men, can see what each of them is doing. It is difficult to keep tabs upon 30 or 40 councilmen, or 100 Legislators, too often it is impossible to distinguish between an honest vote and a bought vote. But it is easy to keep tabs upon three or four commissioners. [22 May 1911]
USELESS LAWS
The estimable Wegg, of Belair, continues to flood the Harford county hinterland with his tears. Not until the Back River resorts are turned into Chautauquas and the plain people who patronize them are pumped full of pink lemonade will he have done with his wailing and get the sleep he needs. Wegg has never been to Back River—he is, I take it, rather proud of the fact—but that, of course, doesn’t disqualify him as a critic. All day Sunday he broods over the crimes of those happy beer drinkers, flying-horse jockeys, fried-fish eaters, wife-beaters and child-stealers, and by the time night comes he is entirely fluid. But by Monday morning he is always well enough to dispatch, by special courier, an indignant letter to THE EVENING SUN.
One of those letters got into print yesterday, and—to adopt without shame an orthodox lie—it has just been called to my attention. In it Wegg makes the admission that it is not “sin, as such,” that inflames him, but “the open, bare-faced violation, not to say defiance, of statute law.” In other words, the act itself is not so bad, but the fact that it is forbidden by statute makes it heinous. With all due respect to a distinguished moralist I must permit myself the word “bosh!” Certainly the cause of the virtuosi of virtue is in extremis when they must bolster it up with any such idle absurdity.
As a matter of fact, no law carries within itself any mysterious inviolability. The thing which makes a law worthy of respect and which gives it, in practice, the respect of decent men, is its essential reasonableness, its direct and certain appeal to the good sense of the community, its practical social usefulness. One such good law is that which prohibits murder. Now and then the best citizen, for private reasons, may lament that it is on the books and even question its wisdom, but on the whole it is approved by the vast majority of folk without reservation, and they believe that its repeal would work them harm. The man who violates it commits a definite offense against the community: he strikes at that security which is at the bottom of civilization.
But it must be apparent that the statute books of most communities are overloaded with laws which have no such reasonableness behind them—laws which represent, not the community’s sane effort to protect itself, but the bumptious yearning of one part of the community to boss some other part. Of such sort were the sumptuary laws of old England, by which Parliament prescribed, in great detail, just what clothing the common people should wear, and just what victuals they should eat. Of that sort, too, were those Puritan laws of Massachusetts which forbade a man to feed his hogs or kiss his wife on Thanksgiving Day. And of the same sort is that law of Maryland which forbids free citizens to go fishing on Sunday or to look at moving-pictures, or to play baseball, or to buy cigars, or to drink beer (or even soda water), or to do any of 100 other things which, in themselves, are no more indecent or disorderly or anti-social than the act of swatting a fly.
Such laws invade the rights of every citizen whose tastes run to the things they forbid, and so he is perfectly justified in violating them not only occasionally but persistently and as a matter of lofty principle. Wegg himself, I daresay, has bought soda water in his time on Sunday—and yet he must have known that it was unlawful. No doubt he has also bought Sunday newspapers on Sunday, and ice and milk, and perhaps candy for the children—and yet the sale of all these things was and is specifically forbidden. In the same way and in the exercise of the same freedom the folk who go to Back River buy beer and fried fish on Sunday. The act, true enough, is unlawful, but the answer is that the law forbidding it is even more unlawful, in the higher and better sense of that term.
Wegg tries to confuse the issue by comparing Sunday drinkers to prisoners in the penitentiary, arguing that the former, like the latter, cannot be trusted to govern themselves or even to decide what they want. Here we have an echo of that absurd presumption which causes a prohibitionist to bawl for local option when the majority is for prohibition and to denounce it—as at Back River—when the majority is against prohibition. In brief, the doctrine is laid down that drinkers are inherently immoral—that they form a class distinctly inferior to teetotalers. It may be so, but you will have a hard time convincing most fair men that it is, for their experience of life teaches them that no such difference exists.
A few more words and I leave Wegg to his smug idols. He argues, in one place, that I have been unjust to the present crusaders—that they demand, not a state of universal coma on Sunday, but merely the observance of the liquor and gambling laws. He even hints that they are not opposed to Sunday baseball, Sunday tennis and so on. If that is true, I should like to hear a specific statement of the fact. Meanwhile, I deny it and in support of my denial point to history. The same crusaders who now denounce Back River have denounced every other invasion of the blue laws. They are opposed to Sunday baseball as well as to Sunday drinking, to Sunday concerts as well as to Sunday gambling. There is upon the statute books of Maryland at present a law which forbids any man, upon penalty of a heavy fine, to give a public performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in Baltimore on Sunday. If any crusader in good standing will sign a petition for the repeal of that atrocious law, I shall be glad to offer him my abject apologies and to buy him a box of five-cent cigars.
But how do such laws get upon the books? If the majority of intelligent men are opposed to them, how are they forced through our Legislatures, and how is every effort to repeal them blocked? Wegg does not actually frame these questions, but his letter asks them. The answer is to be sought in the superior frenzy of the moralists, in their vast talent for making a noise, in their extraordinary skill as wire-pullers and browbeaters. That skill enabled them to get the Anti-Canteen law through Congress—aided and abetted by the natural cowardice and stupidity of politicians.2 Four-fifths of all the officers of the army were in favor of the canteen. Two-thirds of the members of Congress, I am told, were also in favor of it. And yet the crusaders knocked it out, and the army suffers thereby today, and will continue to suffer until the fates give us, by chance, a Congress unalarmed by bawling. [4 August 1911]
STEALING LIBERTY
Discoursing lately, with great rage and eloquence, upon the moral mania which now afflicts this fair land, and particularly this fair city, I ventured the view that a plain fallacy was at the bottom of it, but did not go to the length of revealing that fallacy. In response to many polite requests from the clergy and laity, I now do so. It is the fallacy of assuming, as an axiom of morals, that a man’s duty to his neighbors is superior to his duty to himself, that whenever his own desires come into conflict with theirs, he is bound to yield to theirs.
As a matter of fact no such grotesque and homicidal excess of social responsibility is laid upon the individual by any really civilized society. He has, true enough, a duty to his neighbors, but it is a duty rigidly limited and defined. He is bound to do nothing that will endanger their lives or imperil their property. He is bound to respect their liberties so long as the exercise of those liberties does not invade his own. But he is not bound to yield himself docilely to their mere whims and prejudices. He is not bound to obey their mandates in his private life. He is not bound to put their theory of what he ought to do above his own theory of what he wants to do.
Many moralists forget, or, if they remember it, try to conceal it, that this republic was founded as a protest against the very militant morality they now advocate. The colonists who came here did not object to respecting the rights of the majority they left at home; what they did object to was the need of respecting the mere opinions of the majority. Those opinions, it happened, were chiefly of a theological nature, and so it was religious freedom that attracted the rebels to the New World. But opinions of a purely moral nature may be just as gratuitous and just as tyrannical, and the battle against them, by the same token, may be just as worthy the enterprise and sacrifice of a civilized white man.
It is moral tyranny that now afflicts These States, and the worst of the matter is that thousands of Americans seem disposed to submit to it without protest. If theological tyranny were revived tomorrow, they would loose a bellow loud enough to shake the earth, but in the face of moral tyranny they remain silent and sit still. Thus it is that militant moralists, moved by that will to power which is universal in man, have proceeded from excess to excess, until now an almost endless roll of wholly harmless acts is under the ban of the law.
It is unlawful in Baltimore for a citizen to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on the Sabbath. It is unlawful for him to buy a cigar. It is unlawful for him to have his hair cut. It is unlawful for him, on a summer Sunday, to recreate himself by playing baseball. In various large areas of his city he is forbidden to buy a bottle of wine, even on a week-day. Many plays that he may want to see, indubitable works of art, are barred from the theatres he patronizes. He is forbidden to possess certain great and valuable books, or to send them to his friends by mail. The law decides what games of chance he shall play and what games of chance he shall not play, and the division is purely arbitrary and nonsensical.
What is more, this invasion of his common rights is still going on. Here in Baltimore there are half a dozen organizations devoted exclusively to the concoction and prohibition of new and wholly artificial crimes. And in Washington the Congress of the United States is preparing to pass a law making it a crime for a man to have a bottle of beer in his possession—not to sell it or give it away, remember, but merely to have it.
What is the theory at the bottom of all this oppressive and intolerable legislation? Simply the theory that no man shall do, even in his own house, anything which the majority of his fellow-citizens do not care to do in their houses. His act need not be vicious in itself; it need not be dangerous; it need not be disturbing nor even physically visible to his neighbors. All it need be is abhorrent to the opinion of those neighbors, or, to be more exact, to the opinion of 51 per cent. of them. This is the theory at the bottom of moral snouting and moral legislation, and this was also the theory at the bottom of the hanging of Jews and Quakers, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew and the Inquisition in Spain.
No sane man, I take it, objects to laws necessary to the public security, even when they limit his own liberties. I have never heard anyone defend burglary, or arson, or rape. I doubt that any such defense has ever been made in Christendom. But is it necessary to the public security that boys who work hard all week be forbidden to take reasonable recreation on Sunday? Is it necessary to the public security that a sane man, fully competent to take care of himself, be forbidden to drink a bottle of beer? Is it necessary to the public security that a good citizen be forbidden to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony one day out of every seven, or that he be forbidden to read the books he wants to read, or to see the plays be wants to see?
I think not. On the contrary, it seems to me that such prohibitions are wholly intolerable and indecent. It seems to me that any person who essays to enforce them upon free citizens is a far more dangerous criminal than that poor wretch who essays to pick their pockets. The pickpocket steals only a watch, and a man without a watch is still a man. But the militant moralist tries to steal liberty and self-respect, and the man who has lost both is a man who has lost everything that separates a civilized freeman from a convict in a chain-gang. [11 January 1913]
THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMINALS
Marshal Farnan’s3 sensible suggestion that pickpockets be punished by amputating their fingers is not likely to get any attention from the Legislature of Maryland. It sums up the experience and reflection of an intelligent man, and therefore it is offensive, ipso facto, to lawmakers. Besides, even if the lawmakers were able to see its merit, the bawling of sentimentalists would make it impossible for them to put it into a law. A politician may safely laugh at reason, but he must beware of sentiment. The common people, whom he represents and visualizes, do all their thinking emotionally. A sob impresses them vastly, but they distrust and detest a syllogism.
However, as I have said, Marshal Farnan’s suggestion has sense in it, and some day, after mob rule has been overthrown and a natural aristocracy has seized the reins, it may be dug up and put into effect. The rise of democracy during the last 400 years has brought about a correlative augmentation of judicial sentimentality, and the result is that all the ingenious and varied punishments of a more clear-sighted age have disappeared. Today we have but two ways of punishing crime. One is that of killing the criminal—a punishment reserved for a few extra-heinous crimes and (with an accidental exception now and then) for poor men. The other way is that of compelling the criminal to live, for a definite time, in some given place. This last is the punishment commonly called imprisonment. It is a real punishment only to those criminals who hold to the old delusion that the joys of freedom outweigh its responsibilities, or to those who find the house in which they are confined less comfortable than the house they have left.
The so-called punishment of fining the criminal is really no punishment at all. On the contrary, it is a means of evading punishment—a scheme whereby the occasional criminal who can afford it is permitted to escape the just penalty of his crime by paying a bribe. The Chinese culprit bribes the judge personally; the American culprit bribes the judge as wiskinski4 for the community. The effect is exactly the same in the two cases; it makes no difference to the culprit what role the judge professes to play. All he knows is that, having money, he may go free, whereas if he were without money he would have to go to jail.
What we need, of course, is a revival of the fluent and scientific punishments of the feudal ages—punishments which bred ingenuity and honesty in judges, and worked exact justice. A medieval judge had to keep his wits about him. His highest duty was that of making the punishment fit the crime. If, having one day punished a perjurer by cutting a schnitzel from the fellow’s tongue, he next day essayed to visit the same punishment upon a pickpocket, a kidnapper or a strolling actor, the superiors to whom he reported would probably set him down an osseocaput and take away his commission. He had to be alert—or quit.
But today a judge labors under no such incentive to intelligence. He is esteemed, not as he displays ingenuity, but as he suppresses ingenuity. He works entirely by rote. If the murderer before him is a pauper and friendless, he must pronounce sentence of death. If the murderer is rich and well-lawyered, he must grant the classical series of stays and appeals. If the drunkard has no money—seven days in jail. If the drunkard has a wad—a slice of that wad for the communal tin-bank. And in dealing with all intermediate crimes, he can impose only imprisonment, with the occasional alternative of accepting a bribe from an extra-opulent rogue. His sole discretion lies in determining the length of the imprisonment, and even here rigid laws limit his range of choice, and other laws condition and modify his choice after it is made.
How much better and saner the old system! How much better and saner the plan of Marshal Farnan! Cut off a pickpocket’s fingers and you at once make it impossible for him ever to pick pockets again. Here is the ideal combination of punishment and prevention. The crime is penalized and the criminal is cured. Imprisonment, it must be obvious, never cures a pickpocket. All it does is to forbid him, for a limited time, to practice his profession. As soon as he is liberated he goes back to that profession, and to it he clings until the last horn blows.
If, now, picking pockets is a profession that we are justified in suppressing, just as we have suppressed piracy, then it certainly follows that we should adopt the means best adapted to suppressing it. The physical disablement of the pickpocket is that means. It is not only the best means, but also the only means. Moral suasion will not do the trick. Imprisonment will not do it. Espionage will not do it. But mutilation will do it—and therefore Marshal Farnan, as a police officer of long experience and as a man of common sense, is in favor of mutilation.
But only, of course, theoretically. He knows very well, as all of us know, that the Legislature of Maryland will never adopt his plan. Sentiment stands against it—and sentiment is always an ass. We do not hesitate to send pickpockets to jail and there kill them in the shops, or to send them to the penitentiary and there convert them into consumptives, but at the simple, efficient, cleanly, humane and aseptic device of chopping off their watchhooks our virtuosi of virtue stand aghast. [28 December 1911]
A HANGING
Attending at the City Jail yesterday morning, as the guest of the Hon. Bernard J. Lee, to witness the official exitus of a gentleman of color, I was surprised to find no suffragettes at the ringside. In view of their late advocacy of the wholesale hanging of sinners and their plain promise to begin the business as soon as they are in power, which will undoubtedly be very soon, I was full of hope that some of them would be on the scene to observe and master the somewhat ticklish technique of strangulation. But, as I have said, I could find none in the select company of scientists present, and the Hon. Mr. Lee assured me that none were concealed behind the draperies of the lethal chamber.
A pity, to be sure. It was a first-class union hanging and would have given the sweet girls valuable tips for future use. For I assume, of course, that they will participate personally, and even joyfully, in that copious slaughter of the licentious of which they now but dream. When women go to the polls and vote for the practical extermination of the male sex, and then go to the Legislature and put that enterprise into laws, and then sit upon juries and condemn the guilty to the noose, it will be their plain duty, not to say their lofty privilege, to carry the thing through to its affecting finish upon the scaffold. They will do it, I daresay, because they will want to do it, and they will have to do it because few men will be left, after a while, to do it for them. A matter of simple mathematics: on the one hand they tell us that 90 per cent. of all men are scoundrels, and on the other hand they argue that all scoundrels should be exposed to the utmost rigors of the law.
But they missed their chance yesterday, and so I hasten to supply them with particulars of the art, in fear that they may get some friend of mine as their first victim, and disgrace him by bungling him. I pass over, as irrelevant, the affecting preliminaries—the awakening of the condemned by his death-watch; his riotous meal of bacon, fried eggs, French fried potatoes, stewed tomatoes, celery, pound cake and drip coffee; the last visit of his spiritual adviser; the singing of the parting hymn; the composition of dying messages; the goodbys to deputy wardens, newspaper reporters and fellow-prisoners—and proceed at once to the execution proper.
It begins with the fateful footfall of the Sheriff in the corridor. “Come, Johnson, your time is up!” The prisoner rises, the cell door is swung open and the first part of the march is begun. It is to the warden’s office, a deputy sheriff leading and guards walking on each side of the condemned. There a crowd of men has gathered—perhaps 30 in all—and as the little procession enters they take off their hats and crane their necks. The prisoner wears a new suit of black clothes and a low, low collar. He stands up in the middle of the room, unsupported and silent, and the deputy sheriffs begin to strap his arms.
First, his wrists are brought together and a long strap is wound around and around them and buckled tight. Then his elbows are drawn back and strapped together behind his back. Then a gruesome black gown, with a monkish sort of black hood, is shaken from its wrappings and put on over his head, with the hood hanging down. The gown has been used before. The straps have been used before. The deputy sheriffs have been there before. It is a very swift and businesslike proceeding.
Now comes the march to the scaffold. Ahead go several deputies, and then follows the condemned with his spiritual adviser. The rest follow in disorder. Through the jail, down the jail yard, and so to the actual place of execution. The condemned, his lips moving, his eyes staring, looks up and sees the great beam, the clumsy trap, the dangling noose. A long flight of steep steps, perhaps 18 or 20. He must walk up them with his arms tied and his long gown flopping about his feet. If he stumbles, his spiritual adviser lends him a hand and a deputy pushes him from behind. The crowd groups itself around the base of the scaffold. Nobody says anything.
Once on the platform the condemned is led to the trap and there makes ready for his farewell to the world. Two heavy boards are laid across the trap, and on these the busy deputies stand, so that in case the trap falls prematurely they will not go through. One of them, kneeling, straps the feet and knees of the condemned together. Another reaches up for the noose, draws it down and deftly slips it over the culprit’s head. The rough rope scratches him: at its touch he winces. It is drawn tightly around his neck, with the huge knot under his left ear. The black hood is pulled over his head. The deputy sheriffs step back and draw their protective boards out of the way. The crowd holds its collective breath.
Then the chief deputy waves a handkerchief, there is the squeak of a wire, and bang! the trip falls with a loud rattle. The Sheriff, concealed in his booth behind the scaffold, has pulled the lever. Down shoots the condemned man, a shapeless, black bag—to stop with a jerk that shakes the whole scaffold. The sound of that jerk I shall not attempt to describe: it is much like a single low C, pizzicato, by 100 bass fiddles. The spectators, white and clammy, blow out their breaths; sometimes one or two of them faint. Down below, under the trap, a doctor mounts a chair and begins work with his stethoscope.
But this is not always easy. The condemned man may kick. Yes; he may kick with both feet, and swing round like a top, and draw up his knees, and heave his shoulders, and struggle with his straps. A pretty sight! And his nose may bleed and he may otherwise—a sight to see! A warning to evildoers! The majesty of the law! Society at a holy duty! Something to remember!
But soon he stops kicking and then they let him down until his toes barely touch the ground. The doctors cluster around him and listen at his chest. By and by one of them sings out “No heart beat!” and the time is taken down. “How long?” asks some one. “Twelve minutes,” says one of the doctors. “Not so bad,” agree the deputy sheriffs. And then a couple of darkies bring up a coffin and the late Mr. Johnson is lowered into it. The rope is slipped from his neck, and the spectators begin to cut it up. Souvenirs! The gown is carefully taken off him, and wrapped up. Some other fellow will need it next week.
Alas, that the suffragettes were not present yesterday. It was a first-rate union hanging, swift, businesslike and instructive. It was full of interest to the connoisseur. [4 January 1913]
ON NOT PAYING TAXES
From one wriggling upon the sharp spears of doubt and misgiving:
Is it ever decent for a good citizen to dodge the payment of taxes?
Yes; ever. That is to say, always. And it is not only decent, but also highly sagacious and moral. Theoretically, of course, every citizen is bound to pay his due share of the expenses of the State, and that due share is justly calculated by determining the value of his property. But if we proceed from the theory to the facts, we find that the taxes levied upon an individual are sometimes vastly in excess of his due share of the expenses of the State, and that, in consequence, he is brutally robbed if he pays without effort at evasion.
Consider, for example, the case of any taxpayer in Baltimore. If the taxes of the State of Maryland were evenly distributed, he would pay his proportionate share of 58 per cent. of the whole sum raised—that being the fair share of Baltimore city. But as a matter of fact, Baltimore city, by the arbitrary and indefensible fiat of the peasants at Annapolis, is forced to pay 78 per cent. of the State taxes, or nearly 35 per cent. too much, and in consequence each individual taxpayer in Baltimore is robbed of 35 cents every time he pays $1 in State taxes.
What is he to do about it? Submit like a fool, or make resistance? Make resistance, of course. But how? By deducting 35 cents in the dollar from his tax bill? Alas, that would be useless. The sheriff would seize his property and sell it for the unpaid balance. The device of concealing his property remains—not all of it, but 35 per cent. of it. And that is a device practiced by hundreds of Baltimoreans, and with justice, decency and honor. It is the duty of every honest man, to his creditors, his heirs and himself, to conserve his resources. If he wantonly wastes money in paying unjust taxes, his conduct is just as much to be reprehended as if he lavished money upon chorus girls or games of chance.
And beside the obvious overcharge as in this case, there is also, as a rule, a more subtle overcharge. It is represented by the difference between the actual running expenses of the Government and the sum extorted from the taxpayers. For example, the budget of Baltimore for 1912 provides for an expenditure of $23,580,038.95, and of this great sum more than $15,000,000 will have to be raised by direct taxes. But a considerable portion of the money thus raised, it is plain, will be wasted. The lighting department, to begin with, will spend thousands of dollars in an effort to make all Baltimore as hideous as the front of a moving-picture parlor—an indecency opposed instinctively by every truly civilized man. Again, the City Council will gobble $65,000—money for which the taxpayer will get not a cent of return. Yet again, hundreds of thousands of dollars will go into the hands of the work-shirking ward heelers employed in the various departments and on various public works. Yet again, other thousands will be wasted upon political contracts and upon silly schemes for augmenting the glory of this or that politician.
Is it fair to ask the self-respecting property owner to pay for all this debauchery? Of course it isn’t. He is responsible for his just share of the legitimate expenses of the city government, but he is certainly not bound to pay more. When, in violation of his common rights, he is forced to make that extra payment—when, in brief, he is robbed by legal process for the benefit of loafers and parasites—then he is certainly justified in opposing ingenuity to extortion and in thus saving his money. In other words, it is perfectly moral for him, being unable to procure a fair reduction of the tax rate, to procure, by whatever means may be at hand, a reduction of his assessment.
Thus the ethics of it. In practice, the honorable taxpayer is confronted by the difficulty of determining just how much of the money annually raised by taxation is actually needed for the conduct of the government, and how much is merely coveted by political bravos and thimble-riggers.5 In the case of Maryland State taxes, as we have seen, he is justified in chalking off 35 per cent at the start. But how much of the remainder is really needed? Here opinions must differ widely. One man whom I consulted this morning ventured the view that half is well spent and half is wasted. Another put the well-spent portion at 60 per cent. A third put it at 40 per cent. A fourth insisted that it could not be greater than 30 per cent.
In the case of city taxes the same difficulty arises. There are persons who believe that of every dollar entering the City Hall, 75 cents is wasted, while others hold that a full half of it is well spent. My own opinion, based upon 40 years of close study, is that the proportion of avoidable waste is commonly over-estimated. In some of the city departments, I believe, not 20 per cent. of the money spent is actually thrown away, and in none is the proportion greater than 60 per cent. Perhaps 33-1/3 per cent. would be a fair average. That is to say, it is fair to assume that, of every dollar collected in taxes, 66-2/3 cents is spent with reasonable honesty and intelligence.
Thus the taxpayer is justified in “swearing off” 33-1/3 per cent. of his assessment, or, to be more accurate, in concealing 33-1/3 per cent. of his property. So much for city taxes. When it comes to State taxes he is justified in chalking off 35 per cent. at the start, and 33-1/3 per cent. afterward—or 68-2/3 per cent. in all. But inasmuch as the assessments for city and State taxes are levied together and are identical, he must strike an average between the two reductions. What the average should be I do not profess to determine. My private opinion—a mere opinion, of course—is that 50 per cent. would be about right.
