Funding for the digitization of this title was provided by R.J. Taylor, Jr. Foundation.
About The Columbia sentinel. (Harlem, Ga.) 1882-1924 | View Entire Issue (May 15, 1922)
VoL 40 NOTES FROM UNITED STATES SENATE. Once upon a time, there was a King who had inherited his crown from his father—his father having inherited it from his father, the people of his country having had nothing to do with it, at all. This King was a very grandiose person, indeed, and he sincerely believed that he was tile largest human embodiment of the Triune God. On one of his palaces, lie spent a sum of money equivalent, in our coin, to one hundred and fifty million dollars. At this day, that .amount of ducats would equal at least a billion of our currency. Besides this vast palace of Versailles, the Gorgeous King owned the lesser establish¬ ments at Fontainebleau, Chambord, St. Cloud, Compeigne and the Tuileries. Three thousand horses stood in the stables of this Gorgeous King. Six hundred cooks were in his kitchens: £is food was served to the music of many fid¬ dles and horns. Several thousand high-ups scrambled among themselves th^f for the honor of handing him his shirt, in morning, and his pill, when he went to bed. This Gorgeous King had one wife, and several concubines, and numerous children who were not those of his lawful spouse. This Gorgeous King maintained a stand¬ ing army of 143,000 men. This army, of course, was a very expen¬ sive luxury, and he used it against Germany, Holland, and Spain. To prevent the King of England from joining his enemies, he paid Charles II. a large annual bribe, and he no doubt had many leading English statesmen o1i his payroll. In addition to these expenses, he gave re¬ fuge to King James II. of England, when the daughter and son-in-law of that monarch chased him out of his realm. It pleased this Gorgeous King to grant to the fugitive monarch of England the pajace of As to the situation in the State of Georgia, the Legislature is soon to reconvene, and, as one Georgian, proud of his State and deeply concerned about her welfare, I venture to of¬ fer a few suggestions: First: The men who dodge the ad valorem - tax, will dodge the tax on incomes. What we need is a system of taxation which nobody can dodge. The Federal income tax started out with a loud blare of trumpets, to make the mil¬ lionaires pay their share of the national bur¬ den which they put upon the country through their servile Senators and Congressmen. In actual operation, it now hits the young man or the young woman who clerks in one of our Departments, and who has to live on a salary of about one hundred dollars a month, in a city where the rent of a decent room in a respectable quarter of the town will cost twenty-five dollars per month. This will leave seventy-five dollars for food, clothing, and medical attention; and out of this pitiful sum, the Government takes ten for income tax. The income tax proposed in Georgia is absurd. ♦ The very men who hide away their cash, their notes, their bonds, their trust deeds, their stock in Northern corporations, would hide their incomes , and the burden would fall upon the clerk in the store and the stenogra¬ pher in the office, and upon the farmer in his field. - DO NOT CHANGE YOUR CONSTITUTION 1 Do not allow any officeholder to create n new office, or to add one dollar to your taxa¬ tion. You have too many offices already, and your State expenses are far greater than they should be. If you had a business man at the head of your affairs, he would lop off twenty per cent, of your expenses, in less than a year. First of all, he would abolish the eight hundred offices held by these arbitrarily ap¬ pointed and discriminatory tax assessors. You would save eight hundred salaries; and with the amount thus saved, you could sup¬ ply every schoolhouse with text books published by your Public Printer. If you go to changing your Constitution, it wiU b§ lik e your statute book—altered so SbsJHaw ♦ fp F ’ i mm 4 r e Price $2.00 Per Year St. to maintain Cloud, with in France a sufficient, minature aiiottment Court, of money j a such as he .had maintained.in London. Thus you will see, that the taxpayers of France had quite a mayber of burdens on their shoulders. I winder if you can picture to yourself! 1oj just what the ordinary French peasant had eudure, in those good old days, whose loss so many aristocratic writers have so often de plored, and which so many artists have en deavored to glorify, in sculpture and on can vass. The French peasant was not allowed to do without salt. For several hundred years the Crown had; taken to itself the monopoly of selling salt ;j fixing buy it its at price, this price, and compelling whether he the wished-to peasant do to j so or not. In evejry year that rolled over the sunny slopes of France, hundreds of .men were ar¬ rested without 'warrant, thrown into prison without trial, and kept there until they died— because they were not able to pay the King’s price for his salt.' The peasant was not allowed to grind his own hovel, grain but between compelled two rough stones at hisj own was to carry it to the mill of his feudal lord, so that the could take his toll out of the peasant’s grain, The peasant could not press his own grapes on his own place; he had to carry to the lord’s wine press, where the lord took' his toll from the peasant’s vineyard. ' The peasant was not permitted to* bake his own bread in the oven on his hearth; he had to carry his poor rye or wheat to lord’s oven and have it baked there, the lord taking his toll from the peasant’s loaf. In those days, the French farmer was not allowed - to enclose his. field with a fence of any kind, to keep in£estedff§e out the deer and the wild boar, which then woods of France. THE SITUATION IN GEORGIA © often that it takes a very nimble lawyer to keep up with the changes. Why is your present Administration so bent on running you into debt, and changing your organic law! This question is being "asked everywhere, and when the Legislature meets, let us hope that some answer will be given. Can there be any objection to having ev¬ ery taxpayer make an honest return of what he owns? If his property is in land, he cannot hide it. If it consists of town-lots and houses, it is “visible to the naked eye. If'it consists of mules, horses, and cattle, it can be seen by the most casual observer. Even the furniture in the house, the books in the library, the utensils in the kitchen, must be accounted for; and sometimes we read an advertisement which tells that some poor fel¬ low’s pitiful house equipment, the bed in which be sleeps and the pot in which his wife cooks his victuals, are advertised for sale for taxes. If a man’s wealth consists in money loan¬ ed out, why should not the notes, or mort¬ gages, or trust deeds which secure these lands pay their share of the tax? Why should they not come up to the tax collector, just as you and I have to appear! Give me a reason to the contrary, so that I may ansiwer it, if I can. If the State needs moro income, do not squeeze it out. of those who have already been squeezed until they are nearly dry. Tap those who are dropsical with hid DEN RICHES. If they are not willing to stay ip. the State and share its burdens With y6u and me, let them get out. The real strength of a State is in those fair minded incn who are willing to say what prop¬ erty they possess, and are wiling to pay taxes upon it. Mr. Henry Fullbright arbitrarily lifted the taxes of the State fifty per cent, several fears ago: has he lowered them since the slump set inf If so, I have not heard of it. The slump began in October, 1920, when the Federal Reserve Board began to destroy Thomson, Georgia, Monday, May 15, 1922. This game must be preserved for the pleasure of the King and the nobles; and the peasant must not erect either fence or, building which would obstruct the passage of the aristocratic hunters as they chased the antlered stag er the huge wild boar. Nothing was much more .common than to see a ealvacade of high-born gentlemen and ladies crashing through the grain held or vine yard of the peasant, "chasing the wild deer or the wild hog, to the utter destruction of + he vines of the peasant, or of the grain which stood yellowing to the harvest. The peasant was not allowed to keep fire¬ arms, lest he should shoot the deer or the wild hpg; he his Was not allowed to keep a dog to guard laud or his house, unless that dog were houghed, so that he could not chase the deer or the boar, At certain seasons of the year, the peas¬ ant could rot even hoe his ground, lest he dis¬ turb the young partridges that were nesting in his field, awaiting the time when it might suit the King or his lordlings to come out and hunt. * At other seasons, he could not manure his crop, lest the flavor of the manure should taint the flesh of the bird, which in due time would come to my lord’s table, Nobody but a feudal lord could erect and a pigeon house: that was the exclu sive privilege of the feudal lord, and he used it to the limit, Great swarms' of his pigeons would swoop down on the growing crops of the peasant, and that the peasant was allowed to do was to frighten them off by shouts, or the waving of his hands, He was not allowed to shoot or to trap them, any more than he was allowed to shoot or trap the quail, or the wild boar, or the deer. It was the peasant’s duty to make the reads and the bridges, over which the King and his lords sped along in going from the country chateau to the royal palace of Ver- our paper money, at the rate of $80,000,000. a month. Lands are not now worth one-half of what they were worth then. i_ Has Henry Fullbright taken judicial COGNIZANCE OF THIS FACT? If so, the secret has been well kept. Did you ever hear of anything more mon¬ strous than an arbitrary advance of taxes throughout the whole State? Your common sense tells you that one part of the State may be increasing its land values, while, in another part of the same State, they are decreasing. As a matter of common knowledge, property in a county may he declining in one part and advancing in another. In Henry Fullbright’s own county of Burke, real estate values have, no doubt, in¬ creased in the vicinity of Waynesboro, with¬ out increasing at Girard, or at Midville, to say nothing of the remoter sections bordering on the Jefferson County line and the Screven Count} 1 - line. In Columbia County, land values have, no doubt, advanced around Harlem, apd Grove town, but my understanding is that between Appling and the Savannah River, the lands have declined in value. No arbitrary rule would apply to any county, much less to the whole State. Consider another thing: Why should tax assessors sit in permanence, and reassess the lauds , EACH YEAR? If the assessment was properly made last year, why should not that assessment ho good for this year? If the assessment is properly made this year, why should it not be good for next? In the absence of any general calamity, or any such radical change as followed the de¬ struction of our currency by the Federal Re¬ serve Board, lands do not materially differ from year to year. ...... .... Then why should a tax boss, like Henry Fullbright, hold office, permanently? Why should there he three tax assessors and a clerk sitting permanently, from year to year, in every county? The whole thing is wrong, and it ought to Issued Weekly sailles. Ai any time that he saw fit, the lord could call on the peasant for labor, and the peasant had to answer this call, and io work for his' lord, or else be cast into the lower dungeons of the chateau, where he kept company with the big black beetles, and the wolfish rats, within walls dripping from the moisture of the castle’s moat. If the peasant had a fair daughter, who attracted the notice of the lord as he passed by, she was his, to be enjoyed for the moment, thou cast aside and trampled in the mud. The peasant had no redress; neither had she. No matter how brave a soldier the peas¬ ant’s son might be, lie could never rise in the army. He could never hope to wear an epaulette, much less, as happened long after, to carry a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. # One-third of all the revenues wrung from the peasantry of France—some twenty-odd millions of people—were spent on the revelries in the palaces of the King. Reckless expenditures on palaces and pleasures marked the whole round of the life of the aristocracy. Another one-third of what was wrung from the mass of the people was spent upon the clergy of the higher orders, cai'dinals, bishops, and archbishops, who shamelessh rioted in vice and crime, just as the lay lords did. ' The other one-third supported the neces¬ sary machinery of the State. But there came on, from year to year, a. growing deficit. The King’s Minister of Finance was a man of genius, and he, in racking his brain for a device to raise additional revenue for this King, Louis XIV., hit upon the tariff. (Continued on^Page Four.) be abolished. The old law was good enough. It ought never to have been changed, with¬ out a referendum to the people. The taxpayers of the State have never had a chance to repeal this abominable tax as¬ sessment law, which was hatched in the secret councils of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce It would have been repealed last yea 1 ', if it had uot been for Governor Hardwick, his private secretary, Mr. Blalock, and the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. ^ Under the law as it stood before this*in¬ novation was made, a citizen gave in his prop¬ erty to the tax receiver, and the tax receiver himself had the right to refuse to take it at the valuation put upon it by the property own¬ er, if the tax receiver thought the valuation w r as too low. In case of a disagreement as to the value, the tax receiver could name one arbitrator, the property owner could name another, and these two chose a third. Then there was an arbitraiion, and, be¬ fore that tribunal, the tax receiver was heard, the properly owner was heard, and either one or the other could introduce evidence to sus¬ tain his contention. What fairer mode of assessing property teas ever devised? Under this infernal new law, the property owner is helpless. The so-called arbitration provided for In this John Slaton law is a mere delusion. Everybody knows it to be a delusion. lu the name of justice, of right, and of fairness between mau and man, that law OUGHT TO BE REPEALED. If this law were repealed, and the amount paid to these tax assessors and their clerks devoted to the education of our children, there would not be the reproach of illiteracy which has grown up under the -Schoolbook Trust, and the Administration of Mr. M. L. Britton. Mr. M. L. Britton is the super-serviceable too] of the American Book Company, just as Ed. McMichael is, and just as Clayt Robson seems to be. Here is one Georgian who sincerely hopes that the new broom, so conspicuous at the Ma¬ con Convention, will do some sweeping, when the. Legislature reconvenes, this summer « IMo 31
