ART.

The committee pointed out that at the taxable rate of 1 per cent the
city was, in that way, being cheated out of the sum of $225,000 or
$300,000 a year. These two thousand firms who every year defrauded the
city were the eminently respectable and influential merchants of the
city; most of them were devout church members; many were directors or
members of charitable societies to relieve the poor; and all of them,
with vast pretensions of superior character and ability, joined in
opposing any movement of the working classes for better conditions and
in denouncing those movements as hostile to the security of property and
as dangerous to the welfare of society. Each of these two thousand firms
year after year defrauded the city out of an average of $150 annually in
that one item, not to mention other frauds. Yet not once was the law
invoked against them. The taxation that they shirked fell upon the
working class in addition to all of those other myriad forms of indirect
taxation which the workers finally had to bear. Yet, as we have noted
before, if a poor man or woman stole property of the value of $25 or
more, conviction carried with it a long term in prison for grand
larceny. In every city--in Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Baltimore,
New Orleans and in every other place--the same, or nearly the same,
conditions prevailed. The rich evaded taxation; and if in the process it
was necessary to perjure themselves, they committed perjury with
alacrity. Astor was far from being an exception. He was but an
illustrious type of the whole of his class.

But, how, in a Government theoretically democratic and resting on
popular suffrage, did the propertied interests get control of Government
functions? How were they able to sway the popular vote and make, or
evade, laws?

By various influences and methods. In the first place, the old English
ideas of the superiority of aristocracy had a profound effect upon
American thought, customs and laws. For centuries these ideas had been
incessantly disseminated by preachers, pamphleteers, politicians,
political economists and editors. Where in England the concept applied
mainly to rank by birth, in America it was adapted to the native
aristocracy, the traders and landowners. In England it was an admixture
of rank and property; in America, where no titles of nobility existed,
it became exclusively a token of the propertied class. The people were
assiduously taught in many open and