The weekly democratic statesman. [volume] (Austin, Tex.) 1871-1883, 1876-11-02
A BLESSED TIME COMING.

DC aFOlucu.
BLESSED TIME COMING.
II is painful fact as it affects assertions
OF partisan honesty in the conduct OF State
States now ruled by their own people, hav
ing escaped the clutches of carpet-baggers,
sums expended arc simply enormous.
Those insane Statesmen" who gave its pc
culiarities to the new government OF Texas
provided the meanest salaries for Judicial
officers whose efficiency and worth are i'm
possible unless honors and emoluments at
tract honesty and ability. Lesser offices
are sustained by systems of perquisites
more wrongful because paid by widows and
orphans, and because the loss to the peo-
pie is none the less because it falls prima-
rily upon those whom society was organ
lied primarily to protect. Extravagant
Systems were created by the carpet-bag-
gers. Courts were multiplied and of course
litigants grew in numbers with facilities
for this species Of gambling and ropers-in
gathered about the smaller judicatories OF
towns and villages, and thus again the cost
of governing was augmented. The new
Constitution, instead of compelling reforma-
tion, instead of lcssening the number OF
courts and placemen, added to the multi
tude, and these and their retainers and the
shysters must be supported by popular In
dustry. 1t is the infinite cost of the main
tainence Of official multitudcs IN the State
aud under Federal systems that renders m
dustry proftless and the taxation that we
see and count is trifling compared with
sums wrested from us by the knavish in
direction of Federal power. 1t comes as
thief by night and levies exactions upon
everything in art and nature except air and
water. At the close of each year when the
honest working man of the farm or shop
or lawyers or physicians office balances
accounts he finds that such sums have been
wrested from him by multiplied govern
ments superimposed upon one another that
his condition would have been better If he
had remained idle. The town, the county,
the State and the Union have become mon
strous machines, each costing monstrous
sums. BY their ceaseless exactions the arm
ofhonest toll is paralyzedand therefore towns
and villages-ere overcrowded with Migrants
and the western confines of Texas with
plunderers and highwaymen. When gov
ernments grasp more than enough to pay
for the protection of life and property, gov
ernments themselves become robbers, and
industrious populations idle and vicious.
Such is the pitiable condition into which
these Southern States were plunged by
thieves who usurped authority in order to
rob in 1866, and the successors of these
knaves, save in Georgia, have not always
been blest with the honesty or courage or
intelligence to apply the knife of reform.
The same cumbrous appliances and the
same horde Of hungry placemen are still
gathered about county towns and capitals
in the Gulf States that first swarmed when
Bullock and Busted and Scott and Ames
and Warmoth and Kellogg were supreme.
The number of Federal sinecures that ex-
ist to-day arc tenfold more numerous and
costly than when buchanan was President
and so potent will be combinations effected
and so hungry the claimants for office that
no man less vigorous as rcformer or less
daring than Tilden could decimate
the army of Federal officeholders now
preying upon popular industry. The aver
age rate of State taxation, prior to 1860,
was about ten cents on each one hundred
dollars of property. II will go down, if
Thomas be elected, from sixty to twenty
cents IN Tennessee. 1t is going down an
nually in Georgia, and has been lessened
one-third in Alabama. In Texas, thanks
to the genius for statecraft of those marvel
code and defined stupendous system OF
government, its disorderly and cumbrous
machinery can be moved only by a weight
of taxation that must still be aug
mented or disgrace awaits the COM
monwealth. But We Only proposed
TO say that property and farms are not val
ueless or unstable because money is scarce.
On the contrary, there are as many dollars
in the country now as in 1867, when
prosperity was boundless. Every dollar is
is good now as then. But property pro-
duces the least possible, and for the simple
reason that all net profits are claimed by
tax-gatherers. Government absorbs the
proceeds of industry, and therefore the
pillow rusts idly in the furrow and fields are
untitled and trsdesmen idle. Reform these
countless governments. Lessen the mum
Der and improve the character OF place
holders. and then the people aud not the
thieves may grow rich, and then farms and
gardens and pretty homes will adorn every
village and bcautify every town and dis
uict Of this mighty but wresoaedly
erned commonwealth.