442 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



really be less. To illustrate further, I will say what I said to a promi- 

 nent real estate owner in a conversation on this subject. He said to 

 me: Do you say that such merchants or bankers shall make from 

 ten to sixteen per cent on their capital, and pay no tax, and I make 

 only six or eight per cent on the houses they are occupying, and 

 pay all the tax? Yes, says I. You seek to tax them, and that is the 

 reason you get no larger per cent on your property. Says I: If 

 they make one hundred per cent per annum on their capital, you 

 should not want them to pay a copper of tax. Why? Because if 

 they made one hundred per cent per annum, next year you would 

 have forty applicants for the house they are doing business in, and 

 if you should, you would certainly get a full rent for it, more than 

 the extra tax, and as only one of the forty could get the house, and 

 the other thirty-nine would be unaccommodated, and if your tenants 

 should be making this large per cent, it is reasonable to presume 

 that they would be making it, or something near it, all over town; 

 consequently there would be near the same number of applicants for 

 every house in town; but as only the present tenants or their num- 

 ber could be accommodated with houses, the result would be that you 

 would not only get exorbitant rents for all the houses in town, but 

 you would have demand for the hundreds and thousands of vacant 

 lots throughout the city to build storehouses on; they would either 

 buy them or offer you such enormous rents as would induce you 

 to build them houses on lots that you have been paying taxes on for 

 years, and received no rental from. Soon there would be houses 

 going up all over the city, block after block. The brickmaker 

 would have more than he could do; the lumberman would have more 

 orders than he could fill; the carpenter, bricklayer, stone mason, 

 foundryman, and all descriptions of mechanics and laborers would 

 have more than they could do, so that the builders would have to 

 send elsewhere for mechanics, and they would come in by the thou- 

 sands. All these newcomers in turn would want residences for 

 their families; and thus would bring into demand and make pay 

 a rental thousands of lots that have never paid anything, and you 

 give active employment to all the mechanics you have, and besides 

 bring thousands of others from other places. 



" Let us go a little further, and see how it affects all and every- 

 body in the city. These newcomers get their houses, and then they 

 want furniture, and they patronize your furniture man; they want 

 a carriage or wagon for family uses, and they patronize your car- 

 riage man; and then horses, and patronize the horsemen; and then 

 the blacksmith to shoe them; and then the retail dry-goods houses, 

 mantuamakers, milliners, grocery-men, butchers, vegetable market 

 men, and, in short, every kind of retail establishment throughout the 



