"Not yet," said the Idiot, "but it will—it's bound to come. In the very nature of the beast it is inevitable. There never was a tax yet that found a warm spot awaiting it in the hearts of its countrymen. The human mind with all its diabolical ingenuity has never yet been able to devise a tax that somebody somewhere—nay, that most people everywhere—did not try to dodge, and to catch the dodgers the government is compelled to view everybody with suspicion, and treat hoi polloi from top to bottom as if they were nothing more nor less than a lot of unregenerate pickpockets, horse-thieves, and pastmasters in the gentle art of mendacity."
"Frightful!" said Mr. Whitechoker. "And is not a man's word to be taken as a guarantee of the accuracy of his return?"
"Not so's anybody would notice it," grinned the Idiot. "When the government finds it necessary to nab leaders of fashionable society for trying to smuggle in one-hundred-thousand-dollar pearl necklaces by sewing them up in the lining of their hats, and to fine the most eminently respectable citizens in the country as much as five thousand dollars for returning from abroad portly with five or six-hundred yards of undeclared lace wound inadvertently about their stomachs, having in the excitement of their homecoming put it on in the place of the little flannel bands they have worn to ward off cholera and other pleasing foreign maladies, it loses some of its confidence in human nature, and acquires some of that penetrating inquisitiveness of mind which is said to be characteristic of the native of Missouri. It wants to be shown, and if the income tax remains in force, we might as well make up our minds that the inquisitorial inspector will soon be added to the official pay roll of the United States of America."
"But," protested the Bibliomaniac, "that will be a plain common-garden espionage of so intolerable a nature that no self-respecting free people will submit to it. It will be an abominable intrusion upon our rights of privacy."
The Idiot laughed long and loud.
"It seems to me," said he, after a moment, "that when Colonel John W. Midas, of the International Hickory Nut Trust, advanced that same objection against the proposed tax a year or so ago, Mr. Bib, you sat in that very same chair where you are now and vociferously announced that there was nothing in it."
"Oh, but that's different," said the Bibliomaniac. "Midas is a rich man, and I am not."
"Well, I suppose there is a difference between a prune and a Canadian melon, old man, but after all, they're both fruit, and when it comes to being squeezed, I guess it hurts a lemon just as much as it does a lime. I, for one, however, do not fear the inspector. My securities are exempt, for they all pay their tax at the source."
"What are they, coupon bonds?" grinned the Lawyer.
"No," said the Idiot; "pawn tickets, interest on which is always paid in advance."