Baltimore Evening Sun (11 September 1912): 6.

As is usual whenever a matter of public importance is discussed in Baltimore, the question of sewer rentals is being obscured by fallacious arguments and extraneous issues. On the one hand, the principal advocates of the rental plan seem to rest their whole case upon the absurd plea that a low tax rate, however bogus it may be and however obvious its bogusness, is necessary to civilization and progress, and on the other hand, the foes of the scheme attack it with false premises and sentimental deductions and so help to complicate and obfuscate the orderly consideration of the problem.

But thus far, if a mere observer may be permitted to express a view, the Mayor and his rhetoricians seem to be getting the better of it, not, perhaps, because they argue better, but because their opponents argue worse. For example, consider the point pressed with such eloquence by the Hon. Fred Wright, one of the Mayor’s chief critics--the point, to wit, that the rental plan would benefit Big Business at the cost of the Little Fellow. Mr. Wright supports this by showing that, under the rental plan, the Munsey Building, assessed at $1,000,000, would pay but $304 a year, or 3 cents on the $100, whereas the house at 1806 Hope street, assessed at $636, would pay $4, or, say, 66 cents on the $100.

On the surface, of course, a gross injustice to the Little Fellow. But a brief inspection is sufficient to show the vacuity of the comparison. The sewer tax is to be levied, not for a general purpose, but for a specific purpose. It is to pay for a definite service, a single commodity, and for nothing else. Well, then, why should one man be charged more for that commodity, per unit of delivery, than any other man? Why should the price be determined, not by the amount used, but by the ability of the buyer to pay?

What, indeed, has the size or value of a man’s house to do with the value of its sewer connection? The city sells that connection, not to the house. but to the people in the house, just as it sells water and as the gas company sells gas, and the only fair way to determine the price is by basing it upon the service rendered. This is the principle underlying the sewer-rental plan, and it is a perfectly sound principle. If a man has but one toilet in his house, he should pay for that one and for no more. That his house may be large or small, that it may have a steeple on it or only a roof, that it may be filled with mahogany furniture or pine furniture, that it may have fine pictures on its walls or only tea-store chromos--these considerations have nothing whatever to do with the matter.

Convert any normal expenditure into a tax rate and you will find that the poor man pays vastly more than the rich man. If he lives in a $1,000 house and spends $15 for a suit of clothes, then that suit of clothes costs him $1.50 on the $100, whereas the man living in a $10,000 house, spending four times as much for his clothes, pays only 60 cents. So with gas bills, water bills and all other sorts of bills. All that this sophomoric and fallacious argument leads us to is the fact that, in a poor man’s budget, necessities bulk far larger than in a rich man’s. But that fact, I take it, is so obvious that it scarcely needs proof, nor even statement.

It is perfectly fair to charge a rich man more than a poor man for fire protection, for he stands to lose more if his house burns down. And in the same way it is fair to charge him more for police protection, for parks, and even, perhaps, for such things as the public health service, the city bookkeeping, the upkeep of municipal boomers and the salacious burlesque show of the City Council. Such things are general benefits, and the rich man, because of his greater leisure, mobility and intelligence, gets more than his poll share of fun out of them. It pleases him vastly, for example, to hear that the health wardens are vaccinating niggero paupers, because, on the one hand, he believes that his own health is somewhat safeguarded thereby, and on the other hand, the spectacle in itself is amusing. But the niggeroes themselves do not enjoy it. In the same way he gets more enjoyment than the poor man out of the antics of municipal boomers, whether they succeed and make money for him or fail and make a show for him, and out of the clowning of City Councilmen and other such official mountebanks.

But the benefits of a sewerage system do not fall under this head. In a sense, of course, they are general benefits, but in a much larger and more valid sense they are special benefits. It does a man a thousand times as much good to have his own house connected with a sewer as it does him to reflect that a thousand houses four miles away are connected with sewers. The gain here is in personal, in individual, in almost wholly selfish security, cleanliness, well-being, dignity, decency, self-respect. And for that gain the individual should pay. It is as absurd to ask his neighbor to pay for it as it would be to ask his neighbor to pay for his bathtub.

The Hon. William C. Stewart, foreman of the late grand jury, in the estimable Sunpaper of May 30 last:

I have often noticed that people looking on at a game think they know more about it than skilled ones who are playing it. That is about how it is with the penitentiary. How can a man who was there only one day know enough to talk about what should or should not be done?

Thus the modesty of the honorable gentleman after his first visit to the penitentiary, on May 28. But after one more brief visit, on August 26, he was apparently expert enough to sign a report beginning “After a thorough investigation of the penitentiary,” and declaring sagely for “modern methods of managing,” and concluding with a long list of radical and revolutionary recommendations. Did that second visit, of not more than three hours’ duration, convert the Hon. Mr. Stewart and his associates from mere onlookers into experts and professors?

Prospects for a brisk fall business are bright in the boomery trade. As soon as the weather cools enough to make rabble-rousing comfortable, the Greater Baltimore Committee will once more mount its soapbox and beat its drum. The boom experts of the merchants and Manufacturers’ Association are also preparing for a big season, and so are many unattached practitioners. Half a dozen new steamship lines, running to Cape Town, Hongkong, Australia and the Red Sea, will be announced in the Sunpaper before October 1. Excellent wood-cuts of the promoters are already being engraved. The Factory Site Commission, after working hard all summer, will soon procure the removal of ten more Baltimore factories to Anne Arundel county. The Hot Towel will revive its sagacious plan for a world’s fair in 1914.