whatever justification it has in England-and there are certainly many-has none here, so far as it is interpretable as a declaration of war upon property.

In such a case, presumptively evident to-day, unworthy vindictiveness, claptrap lucubrations, inverted sensibilities and incompetency have attempted to make a class objectionable, who must always be relied on for the stability of freedom, the perpetuation of the mainstays of political security. The temperament, habits, environment, habitual methods, of those who have financial independence, or who possess investments in industrial works in our land, form the ground structure of permanency in government. The words of Brougham, applied to the aristocracy of England, are applicable to them also: "But for their determination to resist measures which they deemed detrimental to the state, or to which they had objections, from a regard for the interests of their own order, many measures of crude and hasty legislation would have passed in almost every parliament."

Of course the Democrats do not acknowledge any tendency so maleficient and disturbing as a war on property, but their sentiments, the avowal of enmity, under the pretence of curbing swollen or predatory—a familiar catchword-wealth, their concessions to labor devices for forcing the surrender of capital, their frequent tirades and their relentless pursuit of the means of harassing business inculcate in careful observers the lesson of some fundamental heresies in their convictions.

They have taken the Income Tax to their bosoms as a welcome asset to their popular propagandum. Its mechanical vexations are not of so much consequence, but its imposition on a class is a violation of the principles of common justice and of common law. Prevarication need not

hide the fear that arose. Imposed on all alike—the ordinary remunerations of manual exertion excepted—it would have suddenly been repudiated by an incensed electorate. But those who now escape its exactions in admiring its selective agility are short-sighted. They may regret a toleration which in some way later will lead to the stoppage of their own progress or curtail the chances of their own free action,

The words of a deep thinker and wide student may be recalled: "The promises of socialism have supplied the best energy of democracy. Their coalition has been the ruling fact in French politics. It created the 'saviour of society' and the Commune and it still entangles the footsteps of the Republic. It is the only shape in which democracy has found an entrance into Germany. Liberty has lost its spell, and democracy maintains itself by the promise of substantial gifts to the masses of the people."

Should the Democratic party in its exultation at its unaccustomed eminence, and quickened into desperation to keep it, absorb the virus of this quackery, its authority will be overruled and the resumption of the just and equable relations between men under a perfectly free government regained, though it may be attended with embarrassments and disorder and by the unfortunate injection of rancor, a blight of bitterness brought about by its illiberal and thoughtless measures and by the provocation of its rampaging spirit.

The Income Tax has become an established feature of taxation throughout the world, and it is symptomatic of a degraded political state. It belongs to the Old World, and it should stay there. It is repugnant to the institutions of this land, because it is confessedly an acknowledgement of failure. That acknowledgement has never been made be

fore in this new world; that the governments of Europe are failures is so very obvious, upon the slightest inspection, that the Income Tax is hardly a stigma, but only a concomitant incident in their helpless political inferiority. The Income Tax even when impartially imposed, when its collection is divested of the slightest reproach of any prejudicial class sufferance, will prove eventually fatal to the maintenance of our splendid public spirit, the undenominational fervor of patriotism that springs from the sentiment of love for an embodiment of impersonal protection for, and interest in, every member of this family of freemen. That impersonation gradually fades before an inimical government that seeks its support by a tax upon the thrift of industry, the amount of preserved capital bearing but a small proportion to the aggregate of active and profit-producing capital.

It is a constant menace. Gradually, by a slow, subtle, but irreversible differentiation, the people become estranged from the State which assumes a separate existence and an existence sensibly alien and antipathetic. It is not the benign demiurge of the German historians and political theorists, a mild metaphysical incorporeality, but it will with us materialize into an obnoxious oppression. This alienation, this estrangement works, upon the class who pays the tax, and with the slow withdrawal of their allegiance the class who escapes the impost begins to assume a mild belligerency. There is a segregation, and the homogeneity so valuable and inspiring in our country undergoes what a biologist might call "granulation," with the granules cohering at last into a solid of disturbing and of injurious dimensions. Less academically we believe that the present abundant and magnanimous generosities of the rich in advancing all of the civilizing influences, the sani

tary methods, the merciful institutions which most brilliantly to-day contrast with the selfish penuriousness of similar classes in Europe, will suffer from a marginal atrophy that will later penetrate the very centers of philanthropy.

It may seem a ludicrous apprehension and to deserve the ridicule of having been purposely instigated to subserve factional use. But consideration will show it has a reasonable basis, that it is deducible from the qualities of human nature. Here is an enormous country, tremendously active, tremendously successful, lifted in its psyche, its mind and expectations above anything perchance that has existed as a nation before and, at any rate, in a very different and exuberant manner realizing the diffusion of knowledge and of self-respect, of sanity and civilized comfort amongst the people it controls. In such a country there develops a great emotional impulse of helpfulness, of altruism. It is visible everywhere amongst us, in the whole-souled way in which we extricate individuals from penury, lift races from ignominy and establish a wholesomeness of manly vitality in the things we do and say and like. In such a country each individual serves the mass; the mass serves each individual.

Thus there is generated a largeness of sympathy and an affluent helpfulness, binding, co-ordinating all the parts of the social structure and making the concurrency of feeling coextensive with the body politic. Generous help flowed to the afflicted, public institutions were erected and endowed, works of mercy were assisted or put upon bases of independence and education received its share from the always running stream of gifts. It expressed the ONENESS of the country. Now it is sensibly growing otherwise. The arraignment of classes, the biting raillery of individualism,

the untruthful declarations of envy, the rough sneers of ignorance, springing like weeds along the trail of these unsocial, mobocratic laws, will close the hands of mercy, stifle the voice of sympathy, barricade the doors of benevolence and pull tightly the purse-strings of philanthropy.

Slowly there arises a mechanical strain, and as in the hard parts of animals strain develops callosities, rugosities, bony ridges and interferences, this social strain erects boundaries and partitions and the social unit becomes multiplex -as it should not in this land.

That condition is far away yet, and around us still pulses the life blood of the universal national oneness, whereby from east to west and from north to south and from high to low and back again courses the tide of a common love. This perhaps sounds like an extravaganza in view of the agitations that surround us—the trade fights, the brawling and murderous strikes-but such surface perturbations are not significant of any real disturbance of our national bonhommie. They have arisen as accidents, as incidents, and largely by reason of unamerican sentiment, unamerican propagandas, which the perverts of Europe inaugurate, the demoralized servitors under class systems that nothing but the earthquake of the Almighty will ever dismember, who come to this country and, accepting a boundless liberty, with opportunities, to them, almost as boundless as its liberty, start their missions of disorder, of abuse, of tyranizing demagoguery and falsehood.

But their appearance is coincident with the rise to power of a party which subserves their purpose, a party which looks askance upon the creation of rich men, and by a deliberate meanness of sentiment permits the insinuation that rich men are not honest men. This party begins already an apportionment as between those whom it shall tax