Jasper County Democrat, Volume 7, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 September 1904 — A DEMOCRATIC LAW [ARTICLE]

A DEMOCRATIC LAW

Claiming Credit For Benefits Accruing From a Law Which They Denounced. * The chief claim that the Republi* cans make to credit is the fact that they have steadily reduced the state debt since th'ey came into power in 1894. It is notorious that the ability to do this came through the tax law of 1891, which was enacted by a Democratic legislature In the face of Republican opposition. The Republicans carried their opposition into the campaign of 1892, and at the state convention, which met at Fort Wayne, they adopted this resolution: “We arraign the Democratic party of Indiana for enacting an unequal and unjust tax law. It imposes upon the farmer, laborer and householder an excessive and unequal share of public burdens, it creates a great number of unnecessary officeholders hitherto unknown to the law. To the burden of taxation, already too heavy, it adds more than SIOO,OOO for the fees, salaries and expenses of these officers and offices. We demand Its radical revision. We pledge ourselves to enact such amendments to the present law as shall relieve the farm and the home from the unjust taxation now borne by them; which shall place a just share of the public burdens on capital and incorporate property, and provide a more simple and less expensive method of assessment.” Mr. i airbanks, then a candidate for the United States senate, was the permanent chairman of the convention and denounced the law in the following language: “The present odious tax law is a Democratic measure, passed to rescue the financial credit of the state. I misinterpret the signs of the times if the people do not repudiate the law and the Democratic party at about one and the same time. "There is one way to cure the tax law, and that is to radically revise It” At the time the convention denounced the new law as imposing “upon the farmer, laborer and householder an excessive and unequal share of public burdens,” agents of the railroads were gathering data along the several lines to show that the railroad companies were being assessed out of proportion to the farming lands through which they ran. John T. Dye, general counsel for the Big Four railroad, presented the data to the State Tax Board and asked that the assessments of the year before be reduced. On the same grounds the raiL roads appealed to the courts. This law has put the money in the state treasury to pay the state debt, and it is the same law that the Republican party joined hands with the railroads to overthrow.