have not the remotest thought of
suggesting "tax dodging" on the part of the farmers. I know well how
fully they are doing their part towards winning the war, and am
entirely certain that they are just as ready to carry patriotically
their due share of the financial cost of achieving victory as the
splendid young fellows taken from the farms, many of whom I met in
Europe, have been ready to bear their full share of the cost in life and
limb of achieving victory.

The point of my question is not the action and attitude of the farmer.
But here is a great industry exempt from the excess profit and war
profit tax and apparently not effectively reached by the income tax,
which is entirely natural, because in this case the income tax can
neither be retained at the source nor are the large body of the farmers,
many of whom do not keep and cannot be expected to keep books, in a
position to determine their taxable income.

Is it conceivable that the politicians who are so rigorous in their
watchfulness that no business profit shall escape the tax-gatherer,
would not devise means to lay an effective tax if the same situation
existed in a business industry?

The point of my question is, taking the case of the farmers as an
instance, whether in framing our system and method of taxation, the
steady aim has been to ascertain impartially what is equitable and
wisely productive of revenue and to act accordingly, or whether
considerations of the anticipated effect of taxation measures upon the
fortunes of individual legislators or of their party, have been
permitted unduly to sway their deliberations and conclusions.

V

Turning aside from this interrogation mark, I will only add, in
returning to our general scheme of taxation, that there are numerous
taxes of a tried and tested and socially just kind--some of them applied
in this country during the Civil War and the Spanish War--which would
raise a very large amount of revenue and yet would be little felt by the
individual. Some of them have been suggested to our legislators, but
have not found favor in their eyes. Their non-imposition, taken together
with the entire character of our taxation program, the burden of which
falls to an enormously preponderant extent upon the mainly industrial
States and the business classes, not only proportionately, which, of
course, is just, but discriminatingly, which is not just, seems hardly
explainable except on the theory that the in