A STATU OFFICIAL ON EXCESSIVE TAXATION. 645 

 A STATE OFFICIAL ON EXCESSIVE TAXATION. 



By FEAiS'KLIX SMITH. 



IT is not to government reports that a student of social science 

 looks for warnings against the perils lurking in the enormous 

 expenditures and the extraordinary enlargement of the duties of 

 the state. Officials are usually so deeply impressed with the im- 

 portance of their positions and so anxious to magnify the worth of 

 their labors that they are prone to take the rosiest view of any part 

 of the great clanking machine intrusted to their care. With the 

 keenest pride they point to their achievements in furthering the 

 work of human welfare. If modesty does not restrain them, they 

 are certain to paint, with an artless faith in their own abilities, 

 the still greater work that could be done with a slight increase 

 of funds and a little more assistance. Not all officials, however, 

 permit themselves to indulge in the natural vanity of bureaucrats. 

 They refuse either to be blinded to the perpetual failure of state- 

 made civilization, or to deceive the impoverished victims of the 

 same costly system of modern magic. Of the very few of this class 

 Mr. James H. Roberts, for five years Comptroller of the State of 

 New York,* is perhaps the most conspicuous. Astray as he is on 

 the question of a graded inheritance tax, and trustful as he is in 

 the virtue of State supervision, he puts himself beyond criticism 

 in his opposition to the policy of State socialism, now the rage at 

 home and abroad. Indeed, no one could hold it up to graver 

 reproach. 



Whenever an observer of the signs of the times in the United 

 States ventures to say that they offer little food for hope, he is 

 branded as pessimistic or unpatriotic. He is told that if he had 

 the confidence in democratic institutions of a man with a good 

 digestion and a fair intelligence, he would know that they possess 

 a vitality, a power of rejuvenation, that does not belong to an 

 autocracy nor an aristocracy. If he is particularly despondent, and 

 seeks to justify himself with fact and argument, he is denounced 

 as a dangerous agitator, or, what is a shade more odious, as an 

 absurd doctrinaire. But Mr. Roberts has not been consigned to 

 any such depths of contempt. He is known as a '^ hard-headed 

 business man," a title of honor that always frees the most ridicu- 

 lous optimist from any suspicion of the theorist or sentimentalist. 

 Yet, as the supervisor of the finances of a great State, he was 

 brought in contact with a mass of phenomena that forced upon 

 him the conviction that something is wrong, and that if it is not 



* He was in office from January 1, 1894, to January 1, 1899. 



