It is true that the scheme devised by Professor Adams, and adopted at his suggestion by Governor Pingree, required the employment of civil engineers for the preliminary work which necessarily had to precede the final "valuation" by Professor Adams, but the bare statement of this fact is utterly misleading. Professor Adams' own testimony in one of the Michigan tax cases happily places his responsibility for the whole plan entirely beyond controversy. He said:
"In 1900 I was called upon by the Michigan State Tax Commission to determine whether railroads were paying a tax rate on their value equal to the rate on other property. With that problem in view, I formulated this inventory plan. * * *"[[33]]
Any discussion of the proposal for a National inquiry concerning cost of replacement which omits to show that its most persistent advocate, Professor Adams, has advocated and actually conducted or controlled several successive "valuations," in Michigan, as Statistician to the Interstate Commerce Commission, and as special employee of the Bureau of the Census, made in accordance with other methods than those which he now proposes to apply, is seriously inadequate; as seriously inadequate as it would be to omit to state that, using what purported to be the same method, Professor Adams, by changing the details of its application and decreasing the rates of interest used in his computations, raised his "valuation" of Michigan railways from $152,958,202 to $177,689,292 or 16.17%, each of the two calculations being presented to the public, with assurances that it disclosed the actual taxable value, and there being barely eighteen months between them. The writer is by no means alone as an object of Mr. Riggs' dissatisfaction because of public criticisms of Professor Adams' plan for estimating cost of replacement. Thus, of a statement in which Professor Taylor, who conducted the Wisconsin inquiry, questioned the validity of some of Professor Adams' methods, he writes:
"Undoubtedly this statement was made in good faith, and has gained currency by not having been corrected, but it is not the fact."
In another place, referring to a statement of comparative costs to the respective States for valuation work, made by the Railroad Commission of the State of Washington, he says:
"It does not appear to be good taste either to criticize costs of work in other States, or compare the costs in Wisconsin and Michigan with the cost in Washington."
Referring to a paper by Charles Hansel, M. Am. Soc. C. E., who took part in the Michigan valuation, Mr. Riggs says:
"The one point to which special attention is drawn is Mr. Hansel's astonishing misconception of Professor Adams' plan of work. This misleading statement appears in the first paper and is reiterated in the second."
Again, of the report of the expert of the Washington Railroad Commission, who had the temerity to declare that it found "little value" either in Professor Adams' methods or his estimates of the cost of the work, Mr. Riggs says:
"Such sentences, and others which, by inference if not by name, reflect on work executed by men of high professional standing, are hardly in good taste, even if true, in a report to a railroad commission of another State."