Baltimore Evening Sun (17 August 1912): 6.

The Hon. the super-Mahon, in his great message to the jobhounds:

Every door of the City Hall is wide open. The administration challenges the most severe and searching scrutiny. All that I desire is that the public may know all the facts.

So much for the wind music, rhetoric, soothing words. But when a reporter for the Evening News went to the Building Inspector’s department yesterday, and asked for a list of contracts given out, without competition, to a favored contractor, this is what he was told:

It’s nobody’s business.

So much for the truth. So much for the fact behind the protestation.

The Hon. Charles J. Ogle, secretary of the Maryland Tax Reform (Single Tax) Association, in The Evening Sun of Wednesday:

Wealth is product. That part of product which is used to assist in further production is capital. To save the time necessary to create capital we give a part of the increased product secured from its use to the capitalist as interest. Interest ts therefore payment for time. Rent is payment for space.

But rent is also payment for time, and therefore, by the Hon. Mr. Ogle’s own definition, it is also interest. If I own a plot of ground I rent it as a definite space, true enough, but I also rent it for a definite time. And to me, at least, that plot of ground is as much a form or evidence of capital as a bond. In brief, I put my money into it with the one idea of getting interest on that money. If you deny me that right, you must also deny that the taking of interest is virtuous.

Here, of course, we are merely making definitions, juggling with words. But that is precisely the crime that political economists constantly commit—and of all political economists the Single Taxers are the most guilty. They decide arbitrarily that one thing is Interest and another thing is rent, and then they decide arbitrarily that the one is moral and the other immoral. Two rash and unsupported assumptions are in all this. One is the assumption that their definition of rent is more accurate than mine, or any other man’s. The other to the assumption that their definition of morality is more virtuous than mine.

Suppose I accumulate, by the exercise of the literary art, the sum of $1,000. I decide to invest it so that it will yield me $50 a year. Two ways to do so appear. On the one hand I may put the money into a ground rent and so collect $50 a year from my tenant. On the other hand I may put the money into a bond of the United Railways and so collect $50 a year from the persons who ride in trolley cars. What reason is there for maintaining that the one device in less moral than the other?

The Single Taxers denounce the first named on the ground that I am taking advantage of my tenant’s necessities. He must have a house—and the house on my ground is the one most convenient for him. But it would be just as reasonable to denounce me for buying a bond. The persons who use the trolley must get from place to place—and the trolley offers them the most convenient means. Both rent and carfare would be uncollectable if it were not for the dire necessities of tenant and passenger. And yet, if I understand them aright, the Single Taxers damn the one and approve the other.

The trouble with rent, they argue, is that it is primarily grounded, not upon capital honestly earned by its owner, but upon capital piled up by the community. In other words, a house is chiefly valuable because it is in a city, and the city is the product, not of the owner of the house, but of the whole citizenry. So it is. But isn’t that equally true of the trolley line? Isn’t it a fact that the man who owns bonds of that line profits chiefly, not by his own virtue, but by the fact that people living in a large community have to use the streets, and the further fact that he has managed, in part at least, to hog those streets?

In brief, the Slngle Tax theory that rent is immoral necessarily leads us to the theory that interest is immoral, and when we get that far we have got beyond the bounds of practical politics and entered the groves of socialistic spouting. It would be a very pleasant thing, of course, if men could be induced to cease preying upon one another, if the exploitation of the weak by the strong should come to an end, if the reward of each man should. be determined by his merit alone, and not by his merit plus his cunning and his daring. But there are two things standing in the way of that benign consummation. One is the fact that the instinct to prey, the thirst to beat the other fellow, is inherent and ineradicable in man, as it is in the fowls of the barnyard and the protozoa of the sea ooze. The other is the fact that, whatever its cruelties and defects and tragedies, it at least makes for the advantage of the fittest, and that, in consequence, it is the surest agency of human progress that anyone has yet discovered.

Contributions to the Harry monument fund continue to come in very slowly, but it is believed that they will brisken a bit when the wiskinskis get out among the hob-holders and the Democratic Telegram begins to work its “letter of introduction.” To date:

But meanwhile, so I hear, the check for $1,000 which I sent to the committee on Tuesday has been returned. marked “No funds.” If this is true, then the fund is reduced to $39.81, which will scarcely pay for the onyx eyes of the statue.

From the archives of the Old-Fashioned Administration:

From the Hon. the super-Mahon’s attack on the immoral Sunpaper in his great message to the jobhounds:

* * * publishing and repeating exaggerated statements as to * * * the alleged prevalence of typhoid fever.

Thus on August 5. But since then, it appears, the super-Mahon has been converted. At all events, he is now with Dr. W. S. Gilroy, whose fundamental thesis, if I make no mistake, is that there are “numerous cases” of typhoid in Baltimore. In such a manner does political negotiation illumine and improve the mind. As the super-Mahon himself has so beautifully argued (page 41 of his great message), the pursuit of practical politics is the most powerful mental stimulant known to man.