PROCEEDINGS OF THIRTY-THIRD FRUIT-GROWERS ' CONVENTION. 97 



what is called "Main Street." Here he finds a difference in principle 

 of distributing taxes for street purposes from what he was used to 

 for road purposes in the country. There the wealthy and thickly 

 settled sections help to pay for roads in poor, unsettled moun- 

 tain country, while nearly the reverse is the rule in town. His 

 little home is on a 50-foot lot; it is valued by the assessor at 

 $2,500 ; it would rent for $20 a month, which would give a gross 

 income of $4.80 per front foot per annum, while on "Main Street," 

 under the same valuation, there is had net, less taxes, an income of 

 $33.25 per front foot, renter often paying for all improvements and 

 repairs. (And yet the Constitution says, "All taxes shall be uniform 

 and equal.") It is on these three or four blocks of "Main Street" that 

 enough money has been spent in the last thirty or forty years to pave 

 the entire town with an indestructible pavement, provided, of course, 

 that the money had been intelligently spent ; but what are the final 

 results? Perhaps three blocks of a nondescript pavement, which does 

 not like to lie still when the sun shines and besides pleases no one. 

 Here is where the city engineer changes the grade every time he is 

 called upon to establish a sidewalk, gutter, street, or crossing. Here is 

 where he insists upon running all the water on the wrong side of the 

 street, thereby choking the six- or eight-inch outlets that more than 

 three times the amount of water is supposed (by him) to go through, 

 and which are intended to drain the largest part of the city. Now, if 

 by these engineering feats your sidewalk is under water when it rains, 

 you can stay at home. It is on these few blocks where you will find 

 some moral cowardice and even sometimes business graft, born of that 

 much abased abomination the "Indigent Fund," the beneficiaries 

 seldom protesting against a wholesale robbery of the taxpayer, so long 

 a,s they get their pound of flesh, even if it does perpetuate in office the 

 worst kind of political graft. It is on these few blocks that are to be 

 found all the deadfalls, which debauch the old and corrupt the youth, 

 and where are committed practically all the crimes that cost so much. It 

 is here where all the sweeping and daily hauling of their own dirt are 

 done and where the police force and night watchmen hang out; and yet, 

 notwithstanding all this, as well as the manifest injustice of unequal 

 taxation, there is a fascination about city life that causes' many of the 

 farmers' boys and girls (Bulletin No. 44 said 90 per cent) to leave the 

 drudgery and the much-vaunted independent life of the farm, to accept 

 less wages found in the city. Perhaps I should qualify the last state- 

 ment, for it is a conceded fact that the farmer boy usually inspires 

 confidence in places of trust and sometimes supplants the too-often 

 dissipated city youth. It has been suggested to me that this is one of 

 the reasons for the extreme solicitude for the agricultural interest man- 

 ifested by the city folks whose especial prerogative is to get up literature 

 7— FGC 



