Necessarily they were unheeded, for the very obvious reason that it was this same class which controlled the administration of government. This class distorted the powers of government by calling either for the drastic enforcement of laws operating for its interests, or for the partial or entire immunity from other laws militating against its interests and profit. The report thus continued:
Our rich merchants and heavy capitalists ... find excuses to remove their families to nearby points and thus escape all taxation whatever, except for the premises that they occupy. More than 2,000 firms engaged in business in New York, whose capital is invested and used in New York, and with an aggregate personal property of $30,000,000, thus escape taxation.[136]
DEFRAUDING A FINE 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 subtle ways to look up to the inviolability of property, just as in the old days they had been taught to look humbly up to the majesty of the king. Propertied men, it was preached and admonished, represented the worth, stability, virtue and intelligence of the community. They were the solid, substantial men. What importance was to be attached to the propertyless? They, forsooth, were regarded as irresponsible and vulgar; their opinions and aspirations were held of small account.
HOW PUBLIC OPINION WAS MADE.
The churches professed to preach to all; yet they depended largely upon men of property for contributions; and moreover the clergy, at least the influential of them, were propertied men themselves. The preachings of the colleges and the doctrines of the political economists corresponded precisely to the views the trading interests at different periods wanted taught. Many of the colleges were founded with funds contributed or bequeathed by traders. The newspapers were supported by the advertisements of the propertied class. The various legislative bodies were mainly, and the judicial benches wholly, recruited from the ranks of the lawyer class; these lawyers either had, or sought to have, the rich as clients;[137] few attorneys are overzealous for poor men's cases. Still further, the lawyers were deeply impregnated, not with the conception of law as it might be, but as it had been handed down through the centuries. Encrusted creatures of precedent and self-interest, they thoroughly accepted the doctrine that in the making and enforcement of law their concern should be for the propertied interests. With few exceptions they were aligned with the propertied.
So that here were many influences all of which conspired to spread on every hand, and drill deep in the minds of all classes, often even of those who suffered so keenly by prevalent conditions, the idea that the propertied men were the substantial element. Consequently with this idea continuously driven into every stratum of society, it was not surprising that it should be embodied in thoughts, customs, laws and tendencies. Nor was it to be wondered at that when occasionally a proletarian uprising enunciated radical principles, these principles should seem to be abnormally ultra-revolutionary. All society, for the most part, except a fragment of the working class, was enthralled by the spell of property.