I heard a fine citizen say not long ago--a man of wealth and position, a publicist, a man of affairs (I am using the word in its proper sense!), a man who loved, very definitely, the great America that used to be--that for the first time in his life he had the despicable thought that he would like to withhold something, if he could, on his income tax. He felt little compunction for the base thought. Why should he hand his hard-earned money over to a Government which deprived him of so much of his personal liberty and held over his head the dire threat of further deprivations? What was this man getting out of America? he asked me. Just a dull time, to be truthful. He was but one more waffle from the great national waffle-iron. When he wanted diversion he must pack up and fare to other lands, where living is still living, crave a passport, swear that he had paid last year’s tax, produce a receipt he had never received, and promise to pay this year’s, and either not stay away too long or see to it that his lawyer attended to it for him. Everyone is ticketed, docketed, labeled, put in a card-index. This tabulation of citizens--how we smiled at it when the Prussians carried it to the extremes they did! Poor creatures, we said of them, to stand for such arrant nonsense. A jolly state of affairs! It makes one feel so loving toward one’s Government, doesn’t it? We are all children, and Uncle Sam is no longer a symbolical old figure, but an avuncular autocrat who goes about, nosing everywhere, almost invading the sanctity of our homes (ah! he may do it yet!) in his senseless quest for this and that. But just as Santa Claus could never get down every chimney in the world, one feels certain that Uncle Sam cannot pry into every wine-cellar, and examine, if he had all eternity, every tiny bank balance. Moreover, my friend will not cheat on his income tax. He, at least, is decent. Let us not delude ourselves that we are living in a democracy any longer. Laws were passed from time to time in the history of our great country, without the people’s vote; but they were laws that served our best interests and did not interfere with our personal liberty. When our rights as citizens were molested, we got up on our hind legs and yelled. “What is this?” we naturally inquired. “Why, it is what has always been done,” came the answer from the bar of injustice. And that was literally true. Only we didn’t know it. “You can’t break the Constitution,” was a further argument. “Once a Federal Amendment, always a Federal Amendment, you know.”