For several years past the evasion of taxation on the part of those engaged in the business of the city, and enjoying the protection and benefits of its municipal government and its great public improvements, has engaged the attention of the city authorities, called forth reports of committees and caused application to the Legislature for relief, but the demands of justice and the dictates of sound policy have hitherto been entirely unheeded.
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.3
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