656 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the penalty of extermination. Only the people that refuse to be 

 killed, or robbed and enslaved, which are modified forms of the 

 same crime, can respond to a scriptural injunction; they alone can 

 be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth. All others must 

 succumb to the pitiless law of the survival of the fittest. Efforts 

 to escape taxation not sanctioned by justice, so common through- 

 out the United States, are not, therefore, exhibitions of hopeless 

 depravity; they are exhibitions of the natural desire for self-pres- 

 ervation that demands study and heed. 



In New York State the efforts of taxpayers to escape this 

 increasing aggression have had a deplorable effect. To still the 

 voice of discontent and complaint, legislators have tried to lay 

 on their burdens as lightly as possible. Acting upon a familiar 

 definition of taxation, they have tried to pluck the goose so as 

 to get the most feathers with the least squawk. But in their 

 observance of the principles of humanity they have shown but 

 slight regard for the principles of economics or justice. Mr. Rob- 

 erts characterizes their enactments as " confused, illogical, and con- 

 flicting "; he adds that they are " nearly all legislative makeshifts, 

 and many of them blunders." The moral effect of the aggression 

 has, however, been more disastrous than either the economic or 

 statutory. To escape it, the owners of every class of property, no 

 matter what their intelligence, their religious professions, or their 

 social standing, resort to every possible subterfuge. With the 

 cries of the tortured fowl ringing in sympathetic ears, complaisant 

 officials refuse to assess real estate, as required by law, at its full 

 value. " The assessor," says Mr. Roberts, describing this form 

 of evasion and its evil consequences, " undertakes, by reducing valu- 

 ations on his own responsibility and in defiance of law, to protect 

 his own county or town from paying more than its fair proportion of 

 tax, and self-interest lulls the moral sense of the community into 

 support of his action." The same law of assessment applies to the 

 whole State, yet there are twenty-five rates of assessment in the 

 sixty counties, and these rates range from fifty to ninety-two per 

 cent of the value of the land. The owners of personal property 

 avoid their obligations in a manner still more reprehensible. They 

 either conceal it or lie about it. While its amount during the past 

 forty years has reached the enormous total of $18,000,000,000, 

 or more than four times the value of the real estate, its assessed 

 value has not increased. It is Mr. Roberts's conviction, based upon 

 " study and observation," that not " more than three per cent " of 

 it is assessed. The result is that, although real estate pays a reve- 

 nue of over $9,000,000 a year, personal property pays one of only 

 about $1,000,000. As to the corporations, they are equally alert in 



