CHAPTER II. THE TAX-GATHERER. THE tax gatherer is the chief personage of the funding system, who, at the cheapest wages, performs the most offensive service in the rudest manner. He is generally chosen for his want of feeling and insolence in the common walks of life. He wrenches alike from widow and orphan, from puling childhood and decrepit age. His wide range of discretionary plunder includes stamps, incomes, licenses, and excises. He demands a moiety of the coal that warms the shivering body, the match that kindles the fire, the bread that feeds the tottering frame, the raiment that hides the feeble limbs, and the medicines that kindly come to pour their oil into the wasting lamp of life, - to everything which relentless nature has imposed as a necessity upon our being. This unpopular appendage of all bad governments; the pestilential scourge of monarchies, almost unknown to us, is now an embellishment in the hideous picture of the bloody times. The Federal tax-gatherer, a trespasser upon liberty, unknown to our forefathers, who sat smoking their pipes beside their logheap fires, while they told the simple story of freedom to their children's children. The oldest living men had never seen this plague of Egyptian frogs, locusts and lice combined, except in the brief sojourn of the excise. In western Pennsylvania, the proud yeomanry, to resist the excise, raised up against the Father of his Country, and it was the crowning act of the life of the great Washington, to urge its early repeal. But this sentinel of Puritanism (the Publican) can be seen at every corner of the street. His office is put in the most prominent places in your cities, around your court-houses, in your towns, his subs, and deputies and spies, and pimps, and detectives, his countless retinue, are quartered upon the public. They employ paper mills and printing-presses, to keep their accounts against the people, armies of clerks to record them, and multitudes to go out and gather up the substance of the land, distilled from the sweat of the brow of the yeomanry. This gentleman still pays his periodical visits to your houses; peering into your garden, to see what you raise; poking his nose into your pots, to smell what you eat; prying into your wardrobes, to see what you wear. He is not satisfied with mere observations. Lest something should escape his espionage, he swears you upon the Holy Evangelist to search your heart, and then publishes your private business to the public eye, for the double purpose of inviting the usurer to take advantage of your financial condition, and call in your mischief-making neighbors to turn common informer upon you. Dr Johnson has happily defined these men "EXCISE: hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid." "With hundred rows of teeth the shark exceeds, "Hire large houses and oppress the poor The tax-gatherer comes with the stamp, as of old; your business is entrammeled with the odious stamp-the hateful badge of that galling servitude which our proud fathers scorned to place upon their deeds, choosing rather to let their contracts and conveyances rest upon their word of honor, than to surrender their right to dispose of private property or transact confidential business, without the interference of the government espionage. It was the long cherished pride of our glorious ancestors, that the unchallenged power of George III, could not impose upon a free people a system which conceded their abjection. This system of unspeakable oppression has become universal and unsparing. These hungry task-masters come down upon you like a wolf on the fold. They stamp your deeds; stamp your affidavits; stamp your agreements and appraisements; stamp your assignments; stamp your bauk-checks and bills of exchange; stamp your bills of lading and bills of sale; stamp your bonds; stamp your cards; stamp your certificates of loan, certificates of deposit, certificates of stock, certificates of profit, certificates of record, certificates of weight, certificates of every kind, certified transcripts; stamp your charters; stamp your clearances; stamp your contracts; stamp your conveyances; stamp your entries; stamp your insurances; stamp your leases; stamp your legal documents, your letters of credit, and letters of administration; stamp your manifests; stamp your mortgages; stamp your pension papers and passage tickets; stamp your matches; stamp your cigars; stamp your medicines, your perfumeries, cosmetics; stamp your powers of attorney; stamp your photographs: stamp your probates of will, your bonds of executors, letters of appointment, certificates of appointment; stamp your protests and promissory notes; stamp your quit claim deeds, releases and discharges; stamp your receipts; stamp your returns; stamp your deeds of trust; stamp the varied contents of your warehouses. The widow, sheltered in her shanty, standing by the bedside of her dying child, is not permitted to light her lamp, until she pays for the stamp imposed upon the matches; nor can she administer the medicine, until she has paid for the stamp upon the phial or box containing it. The photograph of your dead wife, or mother, or sister, or daughter, or that of the Immaculate Saviour of mankind, must be defaced with the vulgar picture of the sinister countenance of some vain-glorious plundering tyrant, who, not content with robbing the laboring masses, thrusts his indecent presence upon your attention, in the moments of your most sacred devotion, or in the more sacred chamber of your grief. The tax-gatherer is a toll-dish upon the food, as a sponge-cloth upon the raiment of the laboring masses, to enrich the opulent. The income tax enslaves your productions; and, in the wealth of their mercenary ingenuity, all the means devised by the infinite resources of despotism and fraud, have failed to meet the growing demands of the fathomless debt, which will bind in chains the progressive industry of the unborn generation of our race. The business of these tax-gatherers is even more detestable, when we remember the purposes for which the money is collected. This universal scourge of nations is now omnipresent. He perambulates the Shenandoah Valley, searching among the ruins of the old and magnificent mansions, for the taxes upon what has been left. He adds to the unremunerative toil of taxgatherer, the benevolent mission of colporteur, and sells the photograph of Philip Sheridan, with the panoramic scenes of the burning valley, embellished with the report of his campaign among the defenceless women and children, emblazoned in capital letters: "I HAVE DESTROYED OVER TWO THOUSAND BARNS, FILLED WITH WHEAT, AND HAY, AND FARMING IMPLEMENTS; OVER SEVENTY MILLS, FILLED WITH FLOUR, AND WHEAT; ALL OF THE HOUSES WITHIN AN AREA OF FIVE MILES, WERE BURNED." -P. H. Sheridan, &c. These pictures will stir up the smouldering fires of a glorious manhood, smothered, but still alive. The women, poor, but proud as on the day when the monster trod their sacred hearths as a scourge of darkness, will not cheerfully give the fruits of their labor to pay the remaining debt incurred in their destruction. Time will not improve the temper of their children, growing into manhood, who hear the thrilling story from the mother's lips, of their absent father, whose smiling face they barely recollect, as disappearing in the smoke of their burning homes. The tax-gatherer in the invaded States, who has been ostler or hangman in the North, whence he has been expelled as the debris of society, will, with his venal hirelings, enter upon their duty in Lexington, Virginia, which distant generations will venerate, as the home and tomb of the immortal Jackson. Amid the scenes where fiends, invested with the human form, gloated their eyes with the lurid glare of burning villas, feasted their ears with the shrieks of the aged and infirm, struggling to escape the consuming fire, like satyrs dressed in military costume, danced upon the ashes of libraries, bestowed by states men, philosophers, jurists, warriors and divines, as keepsakes of liberty. Nor will the impudence of the versatile collector be in the least abashed, to bear with him the life-sized likeness of the idiot Hunter, who left in flames the cottage that gave him shelter in childhood, burned the house in which he was born, and desolated the home of the negro nurse who gave him suck; insatiate with hate, driven from his pillage with inferior force, strewing his march with the starving, wounded, and dead, that fell victims to his imbecile cruelty. The tax-gatherer will grow merry, when, with a coarse grin, he assures the people that their taxes shall be appropriated to pay for dismantling the monument of Washington, and leveling in ashes the literary institution which wore his name, and burning the village homes of women and children, in the quiet recesses of the mountain. This government menial will carry his business and espionage to Columbia, where the most beautiful inland city of America stood monumental of a peerless civilization. This lovely home of a prosperous people was adorned with statues, paintings, libraries, institutions of public charts, spacious temples of the living God, beautiful edifices reared to the promulgation of learning, science, and the fine arts, rich in the trophies of a revolution which had secured our common independence; their archives were cherished with a fond devotion, only less precious than the sepulchres of her Pickneys, Haynes, Lowndes, Butlers, Calhouns, and Hamptons. Where now the charred trunk of the magnolia and palmetto, mingle their withered branches with the smoky columns of ruined streets and avenues, laid waste by barbarian hordes, will the tax-gatherer go, to sift the cinders, like an Eastern juggler, to get from the ashes, the tribute due his government. To amuse himself, and terrify the people, he takes the biography and portrait of Tecumseh Sherman, who wore not in vain, his savage patronymic, in his march of desolation from the great river to the ocean. He will explain the justice of taxation, by exhibiting Sherman's correspondence with Wade Hampton, who defended Columbia; whose father, Wade Hampton, defended the |