all the familiar footprints of the unscrupulous politician become
visible. Money appropriated for specific purposes is diverted from
them. Over fifty-five per cent of the amount expended in 1898 under
special appropriations was used for the benefit of two institutions,
leaving less than forty-five per cent for the remaining fourteen.
Plans for new buildings or the improvement of old are so changed as to
require an expenditure considerably in excess of the money appropriated
for the purpose. Not infrequently the excess ranges from twenty-five to
fifty per cent, and thus the way is paved for further appeals to the
Legislature to meet the dishonest deficits. A more reprehensible use
of public money is appropriations for new buildings and improvements
of old ones belonging to private institutions. As examples, Mr.
Roberts cites the expenditure of $77,473 upon the private property of
the Malone Institute for Deaf-Mutes, and $457,556 upon that of the
Randall’s Island Reformatory. “In my judgment,” he says, expressing an
opinion that every fair-minded person will approve, “this is a mistaken
public policy. If these institutions are to be steady recipients of
State aid for permanent improvements, the title of the property should
be transferred to the State.” Otherwise any philanthropist might found
a charitable institution to provide himself with congenial employment,
and, availing himself of the courtesy of the State to thrust his hands
into the pockets of his neighbors, make additions to it and keep it in
repair.
But these are by no means the only ways that money picked from the
pockets of taxpayers is poured into the bottomless pit of State
philanthropy. One of the most common and most expensive is the
unjustifiable increase of salaries. In 1894 and 1895, when the country
was still in the throes of the great panic of 1893 and when hundreds
of thousands of people were glad to get work at almost any pay, the
salary list of nine charitable institutions was increased forty
thousand dollars a year. Indefensible variations in the per capita cost
of practically the same service discloses another mode of waste. Mr.
Roberts gives elaborate tables in exposure of this evil. While the per
capita cost of the inmates of the Western House of Refuge for Women at
Albion is $254.27, that of the inmates of the House of Refuge for Women
at Hudson is $217.63. Again, while the per capita cost of the inmates
of the State Industrial School at Rochester is $219.49, that of the
inmates of the Reformatory on Randall’s Island is $210.59. Still again,
while the per capita cost of the inmates of the State School for the
Blind at Batavia is $313.74, that of the inmates of the Northern New
York Institute for Deaf-Mutes at Malone is $258.36. If it be remembered
that the institutions on Randall’s Island and at Malone are under
private management, the lower rate prevailing there, compared with the
higher rate at the Batavia and Rochester institutions, suggest a fact
of no slight significance. “Private institutions,” says Mr. Roberts,
calling attention to it, “are only paid in some instances $110 per
annum for the care and support of inmates, ... while the cost in State
institutions is more than $200 per annum.” Yet, despite the possible
indefinite multiplication of such facts, the “new” reformer pins his
faith to the State as a fit agent for the regeneration of his fellows.
Before leaving these institutions I must call attention to another
characteristic form of waste. I refer to the delicacies furnished to
the officials and inmates. “It has not seemed exactly right,” says
Mr. Roberts, setting forth the scandal in very moderate terms, “that
the taxpayers of the State should be required to pay for Blue Points,
lobster, terrapin, frogs’ legs, partridge, quail, venison, and most of
the delicacies of the season to supply the tables of officials already
well paid and well housed by the State.” But solicitude about table
economies was never known to be a trait of bureaucratic parasites. They
never trouble themselves to prolong their vision to the meager tables
of the poor and suffering robbed of the necessaries of life to load
theirs with luxuries. The same limited vision is exhibited on holidays
in their generosity at other people’s expense. “Is it fair,” says Mr.
Roberts, protesting against this touching display of human goodness,
“that the average workingman should wear poor clothes and live on plain
fare in order that he may bring up his family decently and honestly,
while the inmates of State institutions are indulged with turkey at
eighteen cents a pound, footballs at $4.83 each, oranges, candy, nuts,
ice cream, and expensive luxuries?... It must not be forgotten,” he
adds, mentioning a truth commonly forgotten even by people that have
reached a higher civilization than that of the average State official,
“that the money spent for these inmates is not voluntary contribution,
but is the product of enforced taxation.”[C]
[C] But I ought to add that this mismanagement of State
charitable institutions is duplicated in the management
of other State departments that came under Mr. Roberts’s
observation. Although more than $24,000,000 have been
spent on the new Capitol, it proves to be too small
for the purposes it was designed to meet. Mr. Roberts
recommends the conversion of the old State Hall into a
finance building. The State Library has become so large
that it will soon require a separate building. The racing
tax law was so bunglingly framed that the collections
under it in 1896 were attended with “more difficulty and
expense than usual.” As the forest-preserve law stood in
1896, it permitted people purchasing State lands to strip
them of lumber, and then, owing to certain irregularities
connected with the sale, making it illegal, to recover the
money originally paid with interest at six and seven per
cent added. Because of the absence of any law covering
the personal expenditures of members of legislative
investigating committees, claims for seven and eight
dollars a day are rendered, although four or five dollars
a day are believed to be ample. Let me add that these
investigations, which, during the period from 1879 to 1896
inclusive, cost $823,534.51, reveal another source of
waste from State management. Still another source of waste
is State printing. Pointing out the “growing expenses of
State printing,” Mr. Roberts shows that they have increased
from $95,029.51 in 1887 to $315,585.81 in 1896. At one time
the law was so defective that it was impossible to frame
specifications for bids that would allow for printing of
different kinds. For example, blanks varying from two to
three inches square to two and three feet had to be classed
in the same schedule and price. A needless quantity of
reports is printed. Some of them are printed in the highest
style of the art and richly embellished with expensive
plates and engravings. One report for 1895 cost $42,000,
and others cost as high as $20,000 and $30,000. “It does
not seem logical,” says Mr. Roberts, commenting on this
extravagance, “to spend as much on the illustration of a
report as it costs for clerk hire in many departments.”
Another evil is the failure of the Legislature to
appropriate money enough to meet the printing bills each
year, thus making it necessary either to borrow money to
pay them or to compel the printer to wait for his pay
at a loss of interest on the amount due him. In this
connection attention must be called to the failure of the
Legislature to provide money enough to cover expenditures
during the period intervening before funds are available
from taxation. Although Mr. Roberts recommended repeatedly
legislation for the avoidance of this difficulty, which
causes waste, no attention was paid to him. The management
of court and trust funds by county treasurers has been
particularly scandalous. In disregard of the express
direction of the courts, thousands of dollars were retained
by parties or their attorneys for their own personal
benefit. Money has been paid out by county treasurers
without certified orders of the courts merely upon the
assurance of attorneys that the payments were proper. The
rules framed by the comptroller in regard to this matter
were constantly disregarded. Excessive allowances were made
for costs of attorneys. In the case of one estate of $750,
thus robbed, only $60 remained for the payment of the debts
against it. By the defalcations of county treasurers, court
and trust funds are often depleted, and the beneficiaries,
often widows, orphans, and unfortunate litigants, are
robbed. Mr. Roberts has recommended legislation on this
subject, but no attention, as far as I know, has been paid
to it. It is one of those “parochial” questions that the
American people appear to have no taste for. But it would
seem as if the protection of citizens, especially the poor
and weak, was the first duty of the State.
Resistance to aggression is one of the fundamental instincts of the
human race. It has been enforced during countless ages by the penalty
of extermination. Only the people that refuse to be killed, or robbed
and enslaved, which are modified forms of the same crime, can respond
to a scriptural injunction; they alone can be fruitful, multiply, and
replenish the earth. All others must succumb to the pitiless law of the
survival of the fittest. Efforts to escape taxation not sanctioned by
justice, so common throughout the United States, are not, therefore,
exhibitions of hopeless depravity; they are exhibitions of the natural
desire for self-preservation that demands study and heed.
In New York State the efforts of taxpayers to escape this increasing
aggression have had a deplorable effect. To still the voice of
discontent and complaint, legislators have tried to lay on their
burdens as lightly as possible. Acting upon a familiar definition
of taxation, they have tried to pluck the goose so as to get the
most feathers with the least squawk. But in their observance of the
principles of humanity they have shown but slight regard for the
principles of economics or justice. Mr. Roberts characterizes their
enactments as “confused, illogical, and conflicting”; he adds that they
are “nearly all legislative makeshifts, and many of them blunders.”
The moral effect of the aggression has, however, been more disastrous
than either the economic or statutory. To escape it, the owners of
every class of property, no matter what their intelligence, their
religious professions, or their social standing, resort to every
possible subterfuge. With the cries of the tortured fowl ringing in
sympathetic ears, complaisant officials refuse to assess real estate,
as required by law, at its full value. “The assessor,” says Mr.
Roberts, describing this form of evasion and its evil consequences,
“undertakes, by reducing valuations on his own responsibility and in
defiance of law, to protect his own county or town from paying more
than its fair proportion of tax, and self-interest lulls the moral
sense of the community into support of his action.” The same law of
assessment applies to the whole State, yet there are twenty-five rates
of assessment in the sixty counties, and these rates range from fifty
to ninety-two per cent of the value of the land. The owners of personal
property avoid their obligations in a manner still more reprehensible.
They either conceal it or lie about it. While its amount during the
past forty years has reached the enormous total of $18,000,000,000,
or more than four times the value of the real estate, its assessed
value has not increased. It is Mr. Roberts’s conviction, based upon
“study and observation,” that not “more than three per cent” of it
is assessed. The result is that, although real estate pays a revenue
of over $9,000,000 a year, personal property pays one of only about
$1,000,000. As to the corporations, they are equally alert in avoiding
their obligations. Before the enactment of a recent law they did it by
watering their stocks and issuing bonds, thus creating an indebtedness
equal to their capital. They do it now by incorporating in other States
and carrying on business in this State. They do it also by neglecting
for a certain time to make the reports required by law, and then taking
refuge behind the statute of limitations. If the burdens thrust upon
them can not be shirked or borne, they fly to other States, where the
aggressions of the tax collector are less ruinous.
To compel officials to do their duty, countless expedients have been
invented from time immemorial. In the face of proof mountains high that
no legislative or administrative device can uproot the selfishness
imbedded in human nature or reshape the conduct molded to this
immutable fact, social quacks still continue to spawn their schemes
to work the miracle. Slight as is Mr. Roberts’s sympathy with them,
he is no exception. As a panacea for the dishonesty and incompetency
of the county treasurers that mismanage court and trust funds, he
recommends the substitution of State for local inspection. By a similar
application of hocus-pocus, he would transmute the extravagance of the
managers of charitable institutions into exemplary economy. Disgusted
with the charlatans in charge of certain duties connected with these
institutions requiring special skill and knowledge, he thinks “it would
be well to provide a corps of enthusiastic scientists ... who have more
than a pecuniary interest” in their work. But another recommendation of
his is a direct assault on this simple faith in the honor and integrity
of specialists. Already many of the departments of the State are in
the hands of men supposed to have a special aptitude and liking for
their duties. But Mr. Roberts finds that “leaving the department to
expend the money as it deems best,” instead of appropriating it for a
specific purpose, “is not in the interest of economy.” He says that
“it absolutely deprives the Legislature of that judicial scrutiny of
the necessity of appropriations” that “it should always exercise, and
leaves to the judgment of one what could often be better decided if
considered by several.” Could a deadlier blow be given to a common
theory that under government management we have the same division of
labor and the same perfect adjustment of means to ends that we have
under private management? What legislative body, chosen by universal
suffrage, the most perfect instrument ever invented for the selection
of incompetents, would enable it to exercise the supervision over the
thousand activities of life that Mr. Roberts recommends?
The same futile ingenuity exhibited in making officials do their
duty is exhibited in making taxpayers do theirs. One of the multitude
of plans suggested is a single tax on land; but that does not
seem promising, for it would not prevent the discriminations that
assessors make--discriminations that Mr. Roberts himself believes
to be beyond the reach of even State supervision. Another is a more
rigid enforcement of the personal-property tax; but this is equally
unpromising. “The fact is,” says Mr. Roberts, “that from the dawn
of civilization the wit of man has failed to discover a plan by
which intangible personal property could be made to pay its share of
taxation, and it will never be made to pay on the ordinary assessment
plan.” Besides the increase of taxes on corporations, the taxation of
franchises, which has just been authorized, and a general revision
and simplification of tax laws, it has been proposed that a graded
inheritance tax be adopted. Mr. Roberts is particularly enamored of
this idea. But his advocacy of it betrays the same disregard of the
rights of others, and leads to the same appeals to specious facts
and arguments that always accompany the commission of aggression in
politics as well as in war. His reasoning is that since “special
privileges conferred by government,” such as tariff laws, corporation
laws, public franchises, etc., are “the foundation of most of the
great fortunes of the country to-day”; since these fortunes are, to a
considerable extent, “composed of personal property” that “very largely
escapes taxation”; since the decedent has been “allowed the use and
enjoyment of his fortune during life,” and the beneficiary simply
pays “a fee for the privilege of receiving an estate in the creation
of which he had little or no hand”; and, finally, since he can make
no just complaint against the payment of such a fee, as his right to
receive his fortune “comes from the State--is by the grace of the
State”--the seizure at death of a certain percentage of all estates
beyond a prescribed amount would be only justice to “the mass of small
landowners and taxpayers who have from year to year borne more than
their equitable share of the burden of taxation.” But, the fallacies of
such an argument are easily exposed. The moral ownership of property
does not lie in the State; it lies in the labor and skill of the man
that accumulated the property. The moral title to a bequest does not
lie in that fiction either; it lies in the right of the decedent to do
whatever he pleases with his own. If great fortunes have been unjustly
acquired in consequence of special privileges a great wrong has been
committed, and it is not righted by the commission of another wrong.
The only reparation that can be made is to abolish the privileges. So
obvious a suggestion does not, however, appear to have occurred to Mr.
Roberts.
But even if all the reforms in taxation that could be imagined were
put in operation they would not meet the situation; they would not
deliver the American people from the great and alarming evil of
over-legislation and excessive taxation. An increase of revenue, like
an increase of supervision, is almost certain to increase the injustice
that it was designed to abate. The first year’s operation of the Raines
law contributed more than $3,500,000 to the State treasury, yet the
addition to the public expenditures that accompanied its enactment made
a high tax rate necessary. What the situation requires, therefore,
is not more but less social regulation and taxation. We need also a
gradual restriction of the duties of the State to the limits laid down
by Mr. Spencer--to the preservation of order and the enforcement of
justice. Although not apparently a disciple of that philosopher, Mr.
Roberts himself virtually subscribes to this view. In his last report
he demands “far greater economy and care in public expenditures, and no
further excursions in the field of social supervision and regulation.”
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS WITH THE X RAYS.
BY PROF. JOHN TROWBRIDGE,
DIRECTOR OF THE JEFFERSON PHYSICAL LABORATORY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
We have become accustomed to seeing photographs of the bones of
our hands, and we no longer stop at shop windows to look at X-ray
photographs. Indeed, they are rarely displayed, and the lecturer who
once gazed on a sea of faces as he endeavored to explain the most
marvelous electrical sensation of this century now addresses a mere
handful of listeners. Such patient hearers continuing to the end may
still hear of marvelous performances of this strange light of which the
great public are even now ignorant, and in this paper I shall take my
readers into a physical laboratory and endeavor to make the generally
unknown manifestation of the new rays plain and free from technical
language. I am sure that we shall all leave the laboratory with our
imagination full of thoughts of unknown movements in the air about
us--thoughts of possible telepathic waves through space, conceptions of
new ranges of nerve excitations, hopes of new lights, conceptions of
the vastness of the electrical whirls in that elevated region where the
molecules of the air, in their endeavor to fly into the abyss of space,
are controlled by the earth’s forces and are endowed with electrical
energy by the sun.
In the first place, what is the present state of our knowledge of
the X rays? Have we more efficient methods of producing them, and
can we see farther into the recesses of the human body? In regard
to the first question, we can say that, although we may not be able
to answer dogmatically that we know what these rays are, we have
valuable hints in regard to their character, and our knowledge of their
manifestations and their relation to light waves and magnetic waves
has greatly increased during the four years which have elapsed since
their discovery. They are now believed by the best authorities to be
magnetic and electrical pulses, or waves of extremely short length. In
the spectrum of sunlight formed by sending a beam through a prism of
quartz the X-ray pulses or waves are to be found, according to this
hypothesis, beyond the violet color of this spectrum--far into the dark
region invisible to the eye, and only brought into view at present by
the aid of photography. In this invisible region reside many singular
manifestations of energy closely analogous to those of the X rays. The
ultra-violet rays invisible to the eye have the property of refraction.
They can be bent out of their course by prisms made of quartz. The
X rays, however, can not be directed from a straight course. This
is their greatest peculiarity, and many attempts, both mathematical
and experimental, have been made to elucidate it. It is not a fatal
objection to the X rays being classed with light waves, for, under
certain conditions, even light waves can be made to lose the power of
being bent aside.
Leaving for the present a further discussion of the question What are
the X rays? let us examine what the actual condition of the art of
using the rays is. Many attempts have been made to improve the Crooke’s
tube, in which the rays are produced, but, like the hand telephone,
its form has remained substantially unaltered since the first flush
of discovery. Its present form consists of a bulb of thin glass,
exhausted of air, containing a little concave mirror of aluminum, and
opposite to this, separated by a gap of several inches, is an inclined
sheet of thin platinum, called the focus plane, or anticathode. The
electrical discharge passes between this plane and the mirror, and the
X rays are thrown off from the inclined sheet of platinum. They are
not reflected in the ordinary sense of the term, but the electric rays
converge from the mirror to a spot on the platinum which glows with a
red heat, and the X rays emanate from the heated spot as if it were
their source. Thousands of investigators have endeavored to improve
the form of tube, but, with several important minor appendages, it
still maintains the principal features of an aluminum concave mirror
and an inclined plane of platinum. Aluminum is found to be the best
metal for the mirror from which the rays are generated, largely because
its metallic particles are not torn off by the discharge, as would
be the case if it were made of platinum. It is also light, and can be
easily fixed to a platinum wire. Among the important modifications of
the tube are those which enable the operator to control the degree of
vacuum in the tube. This is accomplished by sealing to the main tube
an appendage containing certain chemicals which, on being heated, give
off a small amount of vapor, and which take it up again on cooling.
This modification is made necessary by the singular fact that after a
Crooke’s tube is submitted to an electrical discharge for some time
the vacuum becomes more and more complete, and a higher and higher
electro-motive force or pressure is needed to produce the discharge
in the tube. It prefers in time to jump over the surface. Thus, at
the very beginning of our use of the X rays we meet with a mystery.
Where do the remaining particles of air go? It is surmised that they
disappear in the platinum terminals.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.--The evolution of the Crooke’s tube.]