Captain Bill McDonald, Texas Ranger: A Story of Frontier Reform

by Albert Bigelow Paine

Proceeding, then, along the only road which is open for travel, and assuming that each owner shall continue to fix the prima facie value of his own assets, it can not be successfully denied that the interests of society demand that such valuation shall be made under oath, and that the value stated in every affidavit shall be the true, full value and not an arbitrary, assumed and fictitious proportion of the same.

The "full rendition" law, considered in connection with other statutes in force upon the same subject, provides an admirable system of local equalization, and tends in a very considerable degree toward equalization throughout the limits of Texas.

But this is a State of vast areas and of prodigious distances, and in any such widely extended territory it seems to me that the physical conditions alone are sufficient to demand the enactment into law of some method of apportionment which will not depend entirely upon local views and local sentiments. It must be kept in mind that, while the Attorney-General may sue to remove from office any assessor or member of a board of equalization whom he believes to be guilty of intentionally accepting undervaluations, yet, convictions for such offenses are always difficult to secure and the prosecution of the vast majority of such cases would be no better than a farce. The State government is practically without power to compel reasonable assessments in any county or section where the citizens are largely opposed to full rendition. The administration has no legal authority which it can effectually use, but must confine itself to moral suasion alone, and in controversies where interested parties are arrayed upon opposite sides, we, as a people, have never regarded moral suasion and merely moral responsibilities as a sufficiently effective force to be worthy of serious mention. We will not permit a judge to hear a case in court, or a juror to sit on a jury where either the plaintiff or the defendant is related to him within the third degree, either by blood or marriage. Arbitrators must be without interest and not related to the parties, and, in general, wherever an act is authorized which may affect the rights of others, the law is vigilant in requiring that the officer or person acting shall be disinterested and impartial. Everyone will agree that these precautions against injustice are right and necessary, and yet I can conceive of no good reason why interested parties or their relatives may not be permitted to adjudge any other disputed claims quite as well, and with just as large a probability that justice will be done as when they were asked to determine what amount of State taxes they will pay.

A compulsory equalization of some character seems to me the next step to be taken in the forward march toward fairer taxation in Texas. We have come a long way from that original plan of 1837, by which an assessor and two neighbors arbitrarily determined what a property owner should pay, but we are still very far from home. Nor should this occasion surprise, for if the law is to be worthy of respect, if it is to be in any way effective as a force for the right, it must not be fixed and unchangeable, but, on the contrary, must be capable of infinite variety and infinite development, growing with the growth of the people who are its creators and enforcers, eternal in seeking justice, but flexible in adapting itself to the present.

In conclusion, gentlemen, permit me to call to your attention very briefly a few of the effects of the new tax laws. For if we are to return, as at least one candidate for high office is insisting, to the old order of things, we are abandoning not merely the so-called Full Rendition law, but all other of the recent enactments upon the same subject. We are to abandon the intangible tax law, the franchise tax law, the law taxing the gross receipts of certain corporations, and all other of the statutes of the Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth Legislatures by which a fairer adjustment of the burdens of government was sought to be secured. And if we abandon these laws we must abandon their undeniable benefits as well as their doubtful disadvantages, and pay taxes as we paid them in the good old times.

Now, in 1906, when these laws were either tied up in court or not yet in force, the property owners of Texas were called upon to pay a total ad valorem tax for the expense of the State government of $2,443,637, but in 1907 the ad valorem tax for State expenses was reduced to $2,044,566. The operation of the new tax laws reduced the burdens put upon property owners by $400,000, and of the amount which property was still required to pay, something near $214,000 was levied upon railroad intangibles. The saving upon the general property, aside from railroad and corporation taxes, was $614,000 for that single year, for State expenses alone. In the same way, the saving for the year 1908 will not be less than $900,000 on State expenses, not including the school fund.

It can not be successfully denied that the new tax laws have tended largely toward an equitable distribution of tax burdens and that in doing this they have diminished the amount paid by the average citizen. The intangible assets tax alone brought in a revenue for 1907 of $1,470,000 to the State and its counties, and cost for its administration the insignificant sum of $2,650, a result which can not be surpassed in the history of governmental finance.

These are the triumphs which we are asked to abandon by returning to that system where "the assessors under the commissioners courts made the assessments as under former laws."

Now, gentlemen, I for one am not disposed to retreat. I am intending to go forward, not backward. And in the course which I am determined to pursue I am expecting to go arm in arm in the company of the most of those who are here to-day as the representatives of commercial Texas.