of bloated money
getters, who fancy it is not pleasant to pay large taxes, so they go to
Nahant, and Barnstable, and Concord for a few months, and rid Boston of
themselves and--their taxes! Shrewd fellows those Boston Democrats!
They know how to _govern_ a city. So they do in New York. So they do in
Cambridge.

But let us look at another of the evidences of true progress. Every man
votes, you must know, whether he owns any property or not. Now, Mr.
Daniel L. Harris has discovered, in his researches at Springfield, that
of the voters there, _four_ pay taxes and _five_ do not; that is,
four-ninths of the voters pay the taxes and five-ninths who pay none
outvote the four who pay all. This is so generous on the part of the
four that we ought to try to see what it is the four really are about.
Applying the same ratio to Boston, we find that every tax-payer, every
man of the four-ninth party, really paid to the yearly expenditures of
the city of Boston, in the blessed year 1875-6, the neat little sum of
three hundred and ninety-nine dollars, money of this realm.[1]

[1] Total polls of Boston, 85,243. Four-ninths of these will go
into $15,114,389--total expenditure of the year 1875-6--$399
times.

And yet the business men of Boston complain that they have made no
money for three years, and that they can't make any. How absurd that
is, when they can pay such taxes as these! And then think what they do
in Boston for the intellect (as it is called). While they stupidly
complain that they can't make any money, they spend on their common
schools every year--over two millions of good dollars (2,015,380)--and
they teach what--what don't they teach? I counted, I think, _thirty-six
branches_ as being taught in the Boston schools last year. "Art" and
"culture," you know! And in those brutal old times of fifty years ago,
they taught only the three R's. Unhappy and despicable! Did they not
deserve it?

And then the generosity of these Boston merchants who can't, as they
pretend, make anything. Look for a moment at that!

They paid in 1865 for the teaching of each one of those children those
thirty-six branches, so necessary to salvation, the sum of $21.16; in
1875 the sum of $35.23. That is, they voluntarily and gladly paid
somebody sixty-six per cent. more for their work in 1875 than in 1865,
and all the while those merchants pretend they are making no money. Do
they expect us to believe that?

If they want to m