The Crime of Caste in Our Country

by Benjamin Rush Davenport

Let us imagine a scale of income tax for the people of America: $5000 and under, untaxed; $5000 and over, to be taxed. If the chosen representatives of the people, selected by them last November and to be selected by the various State Legislatures elected by the people within the near future, refuse to make such an enactment as an income tax upon all incomes of more than $5000; suppose the people organize themselves, and call upon the country in a general election; gentlemen of aristocratic proclivities, where will you be? Of the mass of freeborn American citizens (quite as good as the sham aristocrats) not five per cent. enjoy an income as great as $5000. Would you resort to physical force? The Hon. J. Brisben Walker, in his article in the Cosmopolitan, indicates the true position that you would occupy. Consider the possibility. Yell “Unconstitutional.” Proclaim that it is illegal. The people would change the Constitution. By the voice of the majority, they would change the laws.

What have you to offer to stem this tide of indignation that you have provoked? Do you say, “Capital would leave the country?” Well, you can’t carry the railroads, the factories, the soil, the buildings from America. You may have your castles in Scotland, but we have your plants of machinery, your buildings, and that upon which your security depends and is founded is in our power in America. Would you secede, as the Plebeians proposed to do from the Patricians at Rome, and found a city on the Sacred Hills of your sham aristocracy? The Plebeians, the Common People, would never seek you with the olive branch of peace and promise offers of compromise, as did the Patricians of old seek the Plebeians, but they would recall to your attention in forceful manner the lesson taught to the Southerners in 1861, when the “Common People,” the majority in America, by their might, overpowered and overturned the seceders who, when they found that the minority, even though blessed with an attempted social superiority, could not rule in the American Republic, sought to secede.

The Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Astors, Fricks, and others, would be as helpless in such a struggle, and never as brave and earnest, as was Lee’s decimated army at Appomattox.

What the people should or will do, it does not interest us to discuss. What they can do is to require that the payment of the taxes for the support of the nation be derived from those sources which have become hateful and oppressive to the people; and, at a general election, the men who form the majority would be those whose incomes do not exceed $5000—no, not even $2000 per annum.

Then, let us establish for the fancy of our sham aristocrats a picture for those who believe in the crime of “Caste” in our country, to dwell upon. The victors at Homestead and at Buffalo would do well, while imbibing the sweet draughts of victory, to consider the bitter cup of hemlock that the people can require them to partake of. Anything is possible in a Republic, by the votes of the majority.

All incomes less than five thousand dollars to be entirely exempt from taxation; from five to ten thousand, a tax of five per cent.; from ten to twenty thousand, ten per cent.; from twenty to fifty, twenty per cent.; from fifty to a hundred, forty per cent.; from a hundred to two hundred, fifty per cent.; from two hundred thousand to half a million, seventy-five per cent.; from half a million and onward, ninety per cent.

There is no pretence in this scale to be equitable or just. That could be arrived at by the statistician and the legislators. It is merely an example of what the people CAN AND MAY DO. The fund thus derived would more than defray all the expense of the Federal Government, pensions included, and increase the pensions besides.

What is to prevent the enactment of such a law, if the majority should demand it?

You may say, Gentlemen of the Privileged Classes, “It is contrary to the spirit of the Republic. It will amount to confiscation.” To men of the Carnegie, Frick, and Webb stamp the people might reply, “Was the hiring of armed bullies, outcasts, and residents of other States consistent with the spirit of the Republic? When you have formed those hirelings into a private army to do your bidding against the lives of your fellow citizens, is it not late in the day for you to call up ‘the Spirit of the Republic’? You have gloated in triumph over your victories and the wants of the people. You have seen us surrounded by starvation and destitution. You, professing Christianity, have made us objects of your contempt and insult. Our daughters have not been safe from the contaminating gaze of your weak, puerile progeny. You have adopted crests, castes, social distinctions, sham aristocracy. You have bowed the knee before the degenerate British peerage. You have taken the money earned by our labor to purchase alliances with the decayed aristocracy of Europe. Is it not late, good my would-be lords and barons, to call up the Spirit of 1776?”

And, even should it come, like the spectres of the dream of Richard III., would it not make you quake and quiver, so contrary are your wishes to the spirit of the founders of the Union?