This so pleased me that I did not try to resist, but allowed this simple-hearted stranger to throw his arms about me and weep a few tranquilizing tears down the back of my neck.Then he went his way.
As soon as he was gone I opened his advertisement.I studied it attentively for four minutes.I then called up the cook, and said:
"Hold me while I faint! Let Marie turn the griddle-cakes."By and by, when I came to, I sent down to the rum-mill on the corner and hired an artist by the week to sit up nights and curse that stranger, and give me a lift occasionally in the daytime when I came to a hard place.
Ah, what a miscreant he was! His "advertisement was nothing in the world.but a wicked tax-return--a string of impertinent questions about my private affairs, occupying the best part of four fools-cap pages of fine print-questions, I may remark, gotten up with such marvelous ingenuity that the oldest man in the world couldn't understand what the most of them were driving at--questions, too, that were calculated to make a man report about four times his actual income to keep from swearing to a falsehood.I looked for a loophole, but there did not appear to be any.Inquiry No.1 covered my case as generously and as amply as an umbrella could cover an ant-hill:
What were your profits, during the past year, from any trade, business, or vocation, wherever carried on?
And that inquiry was backed up by thirteen others of an equally searching nature, the most modest of which required information as to whether I had committed any burglary or highway robbery, or, by any arson or other secret source of emolument had acquired property which was not enumerated in my statement of income as set opposite to inquiry No.1.
It was plain that that stranger had enabled me to make a goose of myself.
It was very, very plain; and so I went out and hired another artist.
By working on my vanity, the stranger had seduced me into declaring an income of two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars.By law, one thousand dollars of this was exempt from income tax--the only relief Icould see, and it was only a drop in the ocean.At the legal five per cent., I must pay to the government the sum of ten thousand six hundred and fifty dollars, income tax!
[I may remark, in this place, that I did not do it.]
I am acquainted with a very opulent man, whose house is a palace, whose table is regal, whose outlays are enormous, yet a man who has no income, as I have often noticed by the revenue returns; and to him I went for advice in my distress.He took my dreadful exhibition of receipts, he put on his glasses, he took his pen, and presto!--I was a pauper! It was the neatest thing that ever was.He did it simply by deftly manipulating the bill of "DEDUCTIONS." He set down my "State, national, and municipal taxes" at so much; my "losses by shipwreck; fire, etc.," at so much; my "losses on sales of real estate"--on "live stock sold"--on "payments for rent of homestead"--on "repairs, improvements, interest"--on "previously taxed salary as an officer of the United States army, navy, revenue service," and other things.He got astonishing "deductions" out of each and every one of these matters--each and every one of them.And when he was done he handed me the paper, and I saw at a glance that during the year my income, in the way of profits, had been one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars and forty cents.
"Now," said he, "the thousand dollars is exempt by law.What you want to do is to go and swear this document in and pay tax on the two hundred and fifty dollars."[While he was making this speech his little boy Willie lifted a two-dollar greenback out of his vest pocket and vanished with it, and I would wager; anything that if my stranger were to call on that little boy to-morrow he would make a false return of his income.]
"Do you," said I, "do you always work up the 'deductions' after this fashion in your own case, sir?""Well, I should say so! If it weren't for those eleven saving clauses under the head of 'Deductions' I should be beggared every year to support this hateful and wicked, this extortionate and tyrannical government."This gentleman stands away up among the very best of the solid men of the city--the men of moral weight, of commercial integrity, of unimpeachable, social spotlessness--and so I bowed to his example.I went down to the revenue office, and under the accusing eyes of my old visitor I stood up and swore to lie after lie, fraud after fraud, villainy after villainy, till my soul was coated inches and inches thick with perjury, and my self-respect gone for ever and ever.
But what of it? It is nothing more than thousands of the richest and proudest, and most respected, honored, and courted men in America do every year.And so I don't care.I am not ashamed.I shall simply, for the present, talk little and eschew fire-proof gloves, lest I fall into certain dreadful habits irrevocably.
End
