really be less. To illustrate further, I will say what I said to a prominent real estate owner in a conversation on this subject. He said to me: Do you say that such merchants or bankers shall make from ten to sixteen per cent on their capital, and pay no tax, and I make only six or eight per cent on the houses they are occupying, and pay all the tax? Yes, says I. You seek to tax them, and that is the reason you get no larger per cent on your property. Says I: If they make one hundred per cent per annum on their capital, you should not want them to pay a copper of tax. Why? Because if they made one hundred per cent per annum, next year you would have forty applicants for the house they are doing business in, and if you should, you would certainly get a full rent for it, more than the extra tax, and as only one of the forty could get the house, and the other thirty-nine would be unaccommodated, and if your tenants should be making this large per cent, it is reasonable to presume that they would be making it, or something near it, all over town; consequently there would be near the same number of applicants for every house in town; but as only the present tenants or their number could be accommodated with houses, the result would be that you would not only get exorbitant rents for all the houses in town, but you would have demand for the hundreds and thousands of vacant lots throughout the city to build storehouses on; they would either buy them or offer you such enormous rents as would induce you to build them houses on lots that you have been paying taxes on for years, and received no rental from. Soon there would be houses going up all over the city, block after block. The brickmaker would have more than he could do; the lumberman would have more orders than he could fill; the carpenter, bricklayer, stone mason, foundryman, and all descriptions of mechanics and laborers would have more than they could do, so that the builders would have to send elsewhere for mechanics, and they would come in by the thousands. All these newcomers in turn would want residences for their families; and thus would bring into demand and make pay a rental thousands of lots that have never paid anything, and you give active employment to all the mechanics you have, and besides bring thousands of others from other places.
"Let us go a little further, and see how it affects all and everybody in the city. These newcomers get their houses, and then they want furniture, and they patronize your furniture man; they want a carriage or wagon for family uses, and they patronize your carriage man; and then horses, and patronize the horsemen; and then the blacksmith to shoe them; and then the retail dry-goods houses, mantuamakers, milliners, grocery-men, butchers, vegetable market men, and, in short, every kind of retail establishment throughout the
