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EDITORIAL PAGE THE ATLANTA GEORGIAN Published Every Afternoon Except Sunday By THE GEORGIAN COMPANY At 20 East Alabama St., Atlanta, Ga. •Altered as second-class matter at postoftice at Atlanta, under act of March 3, 1879 Subscription Price—Delivered by carrier, 10 cents a week. By mail. $5.00 a year. Payable in advance. The Inheritance Tax Seems Just ». n But. As a Matter of Fact, It Is Often Unjust and Unfair. This Is Proved By the Case of Isidor Straus and John Jacob Astor. The inheritance tax on the estates of the late Isidor Straus and John Jacob Astor will amount 1o something like $6,000,000. Os that sum by far the greater part will come from the accumulated millions of Astor, and only a small part comparatively from the estate of Isidor Straus. The inheritance tax is called fair and wise. But it is neither. Isidor Straus worked hard up to the last year of his life. And the sons who inherit his fortune worked beside him every day and will continue to work. They, of course, do not grudge the tax and will pay it gladly to the uttermost penny. But that is not the question. The question is one of justice. And there is no justice in taxing the inheritance of Isidor Straus as heavily in proportion as you tax the inheritance of John -Jacob Astor. Astor was not a creator, a builder or a worker. He sat still and watched his vast fortune increase—he got richer and richer with the birth of every child and the arrival of every immigrant in New York City His fortune was built up not by himself, but by other human beings, whose arrival made his land more valuable. Astor was an estimable gentleman, well meaning, good natured. But the world would have been absolutely no better and no worse if he had never lived. If he had never lived some one else would have inherited his fortune, some one else would have watched it grow—that is all that Astor did. Isidor Straus, on the other hand, was a worker and a builder always. He organized manufacturing, purchasing and distributing en terprises. and he gave to the public, as other successful manufac turers and merchants do, a great deal more than the public ever gave to him. He gave employment to thousands of human beings, his meth ods of merchandising added interest to the lives of hundreds pf thousands of women and helped them to manage their families economically. The work that Isidor Straus did was a necessary, useful work, building up the country, distributing wealth, which is our great problem, providing employment, increasing prosperity. Isidor Straus, was a wise, conservative and constructive finan cier. He was a valuable and unselfish guide and adviser. He was active in philanthropy, which took from his fortune many times over more than the state will take in its inheritance tax. In proportion to their respective fortunes. Isidor Straus TAXED HIMSELF ON BEHALF OF THE POOR AT LEAST A THOUSAND PER CENT MORE THAN ANY ASTOR EVER TAXED HIMSELF. It is unjust to tax the inheritance of the hardworking man as you tax the fortune left by the drone who receives and produces nothing. Isidor Straus, who leaves a fortune that the state now taxes, was a worker every day of his life, beginning in early manhood. And the three sons who inherit his fortune have been hard workers, earnest and conscientious business men every one of them since the day he left college. Those that were honored with the acquaintance of Isidor Straus know that the only anxiety his boys gave him was the extent to which they overworked in the effort to relieve him and take the load from his shoulders. ( There is no justice in taxing the fortune left by a man who has worked hard and been a builder as heavily as you tax the fortune nf a drone. There is no justice in taxing the inheritance of hard workers and builders as heavily as you tax the fortune that is handed on from one drone to another. Lloyd George's system in England is the just system. TAX INCOMES IN PROPORTION TO THEIR SIZE, leaving small incomes free of all taxation and increasing the percentage as the income increases. Just and sane is the Lloyd George idea gaining ground in Europe that taxation should fall heavily with double and treble weight upon the income UNEARNED BY HIM WHO RECEIVES IT Let the tax fall upon the income of the idler, the income that has not been earned by its possessor, the income that represents no active, useful work. Free from taxation or tax most lightly the income of which the dollars represent service rendered to the public and of which the sum total is given back to the public in work well done. There would be no trouble in doing this if we really intended in this country to tax non-productive wealth and non-producing, wealthy individuals. A wise government would encourage with freedom from taxation wealth that is productive and constructive and that gives back to the nation that which it gets from the nation. The contrast offered by the inheritance lax upon the fortunes of Isidor Straus and John Jacob Astor is so glaring that it is used a.s a basis for this editorial in spite of the fact that the sons of Isidor Straus would resent the faintest suggestion of a willingness on their pan to escape taxation or legal demands <»f any kind, however unjust The Atlanta Georgian WAITING By HAL COFFMAN. M* < * X. 1 J" ~ --- IT * ul. ' - ■ . x '■ : - —'— J. x _nx 7 SKY CLAIMS TOLL In the past ten days a woman and nine men have met death while per forming aerial feats. •July I.—Miss Harriet Quimby and vV. A. P. Willard fell from aeroplane near Boston. Benno Koenig was killed near Altona, Prussia. July 2.—Melvin and Calvin Vani nian, George Boutfllion and Elmer and Walter Guest wi re killed near Atlan tic City when the dirigible balloon Akron exploded. July 4.—Thomas Moore, parachute Jumper, killed near Bellville, N. .1 Lieut. Casansa, of the Roumanian army, killed making flight at Buchar est. i\/D<Drr» Ai-frila mect “Scourge of God" More Terrible Than the 111 U IVIOUCIU CAlllld King of the Hun By GARRETT P. SERVISS EVERY day the reasons for making war upon the house fly increase In number. One of the latest indictments against this disseminator of infection and death is that he carries about with him the germs of infantile paraly sis, as well as those of typhoid, consumption and other communi cable disease. It is now believed, says Dr. Thomas D. Wood, in Good Housekeeping Magazine for July, that germs of Infantile paralysis may live for 48 hours, at least, in the body of a flv. This insect Attila, whose march is more destructive than that of the scourger of dying Rome, who declared that grass could not grow where his horse had passed, does not appear in his true character, when we see him quietly sitting in a window, caressing his sheeny wings with his hind legs or bob bing his head while he fondles the Here is a pic ______ ture of a fly re produced by per mission from Good House keeping Maga zine for July. This picture ac companies a val uable article on the dangers of the fly pest, written especial ly for Good House keeping by Thomas D. Wood, M. D. back of his neck, as if he were tak ing a sunbath and hugely enjoying it. His diminutive body 'covers too small an area in the field of the eye to enable us to see its formid able details. We must get optical ly near him, with the aid of a mi croscope. in order to see him as he really is. Then, when all his dimensions are magnified many diameters, ive behold a monster as terrifying as any of the dinosaurs of geological antiquity. Look, in the photo graph above, at the hairy body, covered with sharp spines; at the powerful legs with their spreading spikes at the Joints: at the huge, repulsive head, with its gigantic hemispheres filled with the glitter ing facets of the great compound WEDNESDAY, JULY 10, 1912. x^'f ’ A common house fly magnified so that you can see how one really looks. |i 7 //I// “1 plexion * • • and a custom of fiercely rolling his eyes, as if he wished to enjoy the terror which he inspired.” The description is not inapplicable to this Attila of the in sect world. If, after all that has been said by medical science, you yet have any doubt about the duty of destroying every fly you meet, then consider, for a moment, these unquestion able facts: "On one fly as many as 6,600 000 disease-causing bac teria have been found, and in a re cent experiment the average num ber of germs found on the bodies of each of 414 flies was 1,250,000." Every female fly that is allowed to live usually becomes, in the course of the summer, the progenitor of 8.000.000 descendants that actually survive as carriers of disease! eyes, the most extraordinary or gans of visions in the animal king dom; at the big, hairy, clublike, ex tensible feeler, with which the un clean beast explores the sources of its poisonous diet, and finally, at the strong wings, ready spread for instant, veritiginous flight, which enable it to carry the germs of dis ease that it has absorbed with ex press train speed to its destina tion. Gibbon has described the histori cal Attila as exhibiting the “genu ine deformity of a modern Calmuck, with a large head, a swarthy com- From a model in the Milwaukee (Wis.) Public Museum. Keep your house clear of flies, and above all, keep them out of the kitchen and the pantry. Destroy, or disinfect, or cover with screens, every garbage pall or pan and every heap of refuse in which they can breed. After all, it is not so very difficult to get rid of flies. It costs something, in time and money, but there could be no bet ter way to expend either. Because SOME flies manage to get inside your screens, don't condemn the defenses on that account. We are now' too far advanced z/7/ upon the summer to hope to arrest the scourge by the slaughter of individual flies. Too many were allowed to escape through neglect, or through mistaken mercy, in the first warm days of spring'. The personal warfare must still be kept up. with ever-increasing vigor, but now the large measures must also be employed—screens, fly traps and disinfection. Still, a great deal has been gained. You will find in GOOD HOUSE KEEPING MAGAZINE directions for driving away flies frorn the outside of your screen doors, so that they will not even attempt the assault of your defenses. And you may gather a vivid impression of the critical necessity of eternal vigilance in this matter from read ing this warning of Dr Wood's: "Let everything that goes into any one's mouth—spoons. tumblers and baby's nursing bottles BE SCALDED after a fly has walked on them! THE HOME PAPER Dorothy Dix Writ e s —OF— The Reckless Way We Marry a PRETTY young bride has just jAA been deserted in a hotel in New York after a honey moon that had lasted only four days. Detectives are out hunting the recreant bridegroom, who disap peared owing the hotel and an au tomobile concern, and even a tailor from whom he had rented a swell dress suit to be married in, and the poor little bride has gone tearfully back home to reflect upon the un certainty of matrimony. She is even wondering what her name is, because she doesn’t know whether the man she married was named w.*a<. ne said he was or not, as she has found out that he was not rich, as she supposed, or con nected with a big hospital, as he told her, nor had he ever been heard of at a famous medical school where he professed to have grad uated. These Marriages Could Have Been Prevented. The girl and her family are doing a lot of investigating now into the pedigree and record of the ex-hus band, but it’s a trifle late after all the harm has been done. It’s like locking the stable door after the horse is stolen. All of the good they can get out of finding out about this scurvy villain will be the gratification it will afford their curiosity, but if they had spent one tithe of the effort in turning the spotlight on the gentleman’s record before marriage the poor girl would have been saved from making her fatal mistake. This case does not stand alone as an illustration of the monumental folly with which people marry with out taking the trouble to find out a single thing about the individ ual with whom they propose to spend the next thirty or forty years, and on whose good faith and worth iness their whole happiness and welfare depend. Every day ws read in the papers about girls who have married bogus noblemen or bigamists with another wife in the next block, or ex-convicts, or men whom they believe to be prosper ous and w'ho are swamped in debt and have no way of making a liv ing, or men who have some terrible mental or physical malady, or men who have some hideous blot on their past that casts its sinister shadow over the whole lives of their wives. The tragedy of these marriages is that almost every one of them could have been prevented had the girl and her parents used as much ordi nary prudence in the matter as they would about acquiring a new horse, instead of a new member of the family. Will Let Girl Marry and Not Know Man's Family. They would not have bought a S2OO horse without finding out what sort of stock it came from, who had raised it, who was its former own er. what sort of a temper and dis position it had, and getting a vet erinary’s certificate that it was sound in wind and limb. But people will let a girl marry a man without making a move to find out what kind of family he be longs to; whether his people are honest or jail birds, whether he has tainted blood in his veins or not; whether he has got a wife somewhere else or not. whether he is a drunkard or a gambler or not; whether he has any settled and honest way of supporting a family or not. Os course it s easy enough to see ''l DOROTHY DIX. By DOROTHY DIX why a girl with no experience of life, and infatuated with a mans agreeable personality, might think that it didn’t make any difference who he was, or what he had done She might be willing to buy a pig In a poke, as it were, and marry a man without any investigation of his standing and character, bur there is nothing else on earth so amazing as the indifference of fa thers on this subject, and that a father would permit his little unso phisticated daughter to marry a man of whom he knew absolutely nothing. Yet they do it continually. Many a man sees his prospective son-in law for the first time ■when the youth comes to go through the meaningless form of asking for Mamie’s hand in marriage. For Mamie has told papa to say “yes." and papa is so busy and so careless that he hands over Mamie, soul and body, with every one of her po tentialities for misery or happiness, to the stranger, with as little thought as he would a pound of tea across the counter. Worse: He wouldn’t let the stranger have the -- tea unless he could show that he could pay for It, but he lets him have Mamie without finding out whether he can support her or not. And this isn’t because father has such respect for Mamie’s judgment He wouldn’t trust her to make a thousand-dollar investment alone If she had that much money to put into a stock or real estate or to lend he would take upon himself the task of looking up the title or security and seeing that it was gilt-edge before he permitted her to part with her money, without bothering to see if she is swindled and gold-bricked in the trade >r not. No Excuse Can Be Offered For This Attitude. In this day of telegraphs and tel ephones and newspapers, we all live in the glare of publicity, and there is no difficulty whatever in finding out all that it is necessarv to know about anybody else. 4 postal card written to the hospital with which the young man men tioned at the beginning of this ar ticle said he was connected would have brought out the truth about him, but none of the girl’s family took the trouble to write it. A day spent in a man's home town; a ten minutes talk with his employer: a few judicious inquiries among lii» friends would show any father whether the man who wanted to marry his daughter would make her a good husband or not. An in quiry through Dun or Bradstreet will give accurate information i’ to any young fellow s past and pre sent performances and abilities to support a wife. With these sources of information at hand, is it not simply incredible that any father would be so crimi nally negligent as not to at least Qnd out what sort of a life part ner his daughter is getting when she marries? No possible excuse can be offered for their attitude in the matter Before a father gives his consen to his daughter’s marriage he should have gone over the young man's record with a magnifying glass and a search warrant. Il ■ his business to protect his little girl, and he signally falls to do it unless he does his best to keep her from making a mistake in the mo»t Important act of her lite.