70 - PROCEEDINGS OF THE 



were $7,865,862.18, much of which was injudiciously spent, and can be 

 credited with no more than good intentions. 



The most reprehensible expenditures of public money, however, has been 

 in the so-called aid to railroad companies; whereby communities have 

 been heavily taxed to pay bonds that were sold at depreciated rates, to fill 

 the pockets of enterprising railroad men and to secure the imperfectly 

 built and debt-laden roads that have been passing into the hands of 

 receivers, and which discriminate against the very towns and counties 

 that have given them local aid. 



Next to this, is the squandering and peculation attendant on building 

 court houses, jails, bridges, school houses and other public works; es- 

 pecially in our counties that have not adopted the township system, and 

 concentrate power and temptation in a few persons. But this, I believe, 

 has been less common in our own State than in others that I might 

 name. 



Upon the whole, the condition of our Illinois taxation, and even of our 

 national taxation, seems to me, however unsatisfactory and unequal, to 

 be not much better nor worse than that of older and more experienced 

 States, and nations comparing Illinois with older States. I judge it to be 

 less careful, thorough and equitable in its assessments than the New Eng- 

 land States, but better than New York, and many other Eastern common- 

 wealths. Comparing the United States with European countries, we find it 

 derives a much larger proportion of its revenue from customs, a rather 

 larger proportion from excise, whilst its revenue from stamps is compara- 

 tively small and that from taxes on income and taxes on rental value, noth- 

 ing, whereas they have some importance in European schemes of taxation. 



The Pennsylvania revenue system differs from that of our own, and I 

 believe of all other States. It exempts a very large portion of personal 

 property from taxation on its valuation. It collects the State Revenue from 

 taxes levied on dividends of corporations, on gross receipts for transporta- 

 tion, on net earnings of banks, etc., and levies local taxation on real estate 

 in the main. 



THE DRIFT OF TAXATION, 



from what I know of its history, is to cease to be direct and become indi- 

 rect. It is modified in its methods to suit the interests, or supposed in- 

 terests, of those who control legislation. The lax on real estate disap- 

 pears nearly in Great Britain where the great body of the land is held by 

 the ruling aristocracy. We find it again in France, with her peasant pro- 

 prietors. Our national income tax was discarded years ago by an indig- 

 nant plutocracy, and the taxation on the gross receipts of transportation 

 companies has gone the same road, although both were more equitable 

 than much that remains. The Pennsylvania system I suspect to be a 

 movement along the same line. The payment of taxes to the State on gross 

 receipts, etc., exempts from local taxation and throws a heavier burden on 

 real estate. In any event the New England States, truest in their demo- 

 cratic instincts and least influenced by the interest of corporate capital, 



