The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1895-04-05
THE ANARcnIsTlc DEMOCRACY.
Purposes of the Vicious Income TAI

purposes
Law.
The lightning-change artist in pol
Itics appears to have arrived. His
name is Richard Olney, formerly cor
poration lawyer of Massachusetts, and
lately, by the grace of Mr.. Cleveland,
attorney general of the United States.
His recent defense of the democratic-
populistic income tax measure is one of
the most lugubriously funny things to
which the present administration has
given expression. 'When this income
tax law" remarks our regenerated and
consecrated corporation attorney,
''makes special class of business cor
porations and taxes their incomes at
higher rate than that applied to the
incomes of persons not Incorporated, it
but recognizes existing social facts and
conditions which would be folly to ig-
nore 1t is common knowledge that
corporations are so successful an
agency for the accumulation of wealth
that large section of the community
views them with intense disfavor, as
maliciously and cunningly devised in
ventions for making rich people richer
and poor people poorer. Congress has
adopted" he adds, las the minimum
income for purposes of taxation the
limit of four thousand dollars. The
limit may be said now to divide the
upper from the lower middle class,
financially speaking, in the larger
cities; or 70 divide the middle GLASS
from the wealthy in the country"
So it has been reserved for the dem
ocratic party, or the incoherent and
incohesive collection of statesmen now
masquerading under that name, to set
up, or attempt to set up, ''class" as q
recognized factor or fact in American
life, based on a mere difference in
money, after having been beaten some
thirty years ago in an attempt to up
hold the idea of ''class" or caste"
based on blood or color. Is not this a
piece of amazing audacity. of colossal
political effrontery, worthy, indeed,
only of that kind of anarchistic Titan
so happily described by Virgil as a
"Monstrum, horrendum, infOrme, in
gems, cui lumen ademptum?"
Yet there is one thing even more as
mental somersault, and that is Mr..
James c. Carter's plea on the same sub
lect before the United States supreme
court. Referring to this pet measure
of the just defunct and justly dis
credited congress, he exclaims: If in
the very hour of their triumph the peO-
pie find an obstacle in their way in the
shape of Judgment in lawsuit, they
will find a way to accomplish their
ends over the constitution and the
courts"
This is the first time, we believe, that
q threat, yelled or bare, has been
hurled in the teeth of the supreme
tribunal of this nation. This is, how
ever, a natural outcome from the
vicious income-tax idea. Let us look
at this measure with candor, and strip
it of its cant. 1t is, as Mr.. Olney acci-
dentally admits, scheme to curry IA
vor with a section of the country. 1t
is therefore, base encouragement of
sectionalism. 1t is illogical, for if the
profit system is just one, the attempt
to tax down a mans profits is absurd.
We do not maintain that the profit
system is justifable on the highest
moral grounds. The ideal government,
the Industrial republic of the future,
may be based on some kind of scientific
socialism. But this democratic throw
ing of sop to Cerberus in the shape of
an unjust tax on incomes will not
hasten the dawn of any desirable and
reasonable equalization of mans mate
rial comforts and educational oppor-
tunities. Such legislation only tends
to anarchy-anarchy pure and simple,
with a man on horseback looming up
through blood-red mist in the twen-
tieth century.-Leslie's Weekly.