It’s here. 12 weeks of the Mascot. School is about to start and although I have gotten a lot of research done (most not posted here) it’s time to shift my main focus back to graduate school and grab any spare research time I can. I feel good that I have gathered a lot of information, but with the leg work done, it’s time to sit down and process.
I didn’t want to just end it tonight – wanted to go out with a bang, but it was a very rough day and it is a scramble to just get it out. So here it goes… The Mascot’s commentary on the hypocrisy of social class. Still exists today, sadly.
THE TWO LAWS
One For The Rich, The Other For The Poor.
How is The Oracle Worked? The Almighty Dollar Does It Every Time.
There is not a doubt that there are two laws, one for the rich and a very different one for the poor. Every day instances may be seen to support the statement above made. Should a wealthy man, or a man with a political pull conduct himself as a hoodlum on the streets, in a street car or in a bagnio, and he be arrested, he is either let off without being obliged to face a recorder or else is given a hearing in the recorder’s private office, and the chances are ten thousand to one that he gets off scot free. How ever, should a poor man, or a man without a political pull, get himself into the messes of the police he is sure to be arraigned before one of “His Honors,” and fined heavily or sent to the Parish Prison for the utmost limit of time. The dollars are wonderful things; they are more potent than all the other gifts sent to man. The screw by which Archimedes proposed to move the earth is not in it as compared to the most potent of all levers, the dollars.
Money is truely as powerful as was the cabalistic word Sesame, by which Ali Baba caused the robbers’ cave to open. Does not money open the prison door? Does it not snatch murderers from the gallows? Does it not pervert justice and make it a mockery?Does it not make men who should be true and honorable, false?
Did not William H. Vanderbilt go into court and swear he was a pauper, in order that he might escape the payment of taxes? And, although he lied, and it was knows he lied, still by the influence of his dollars he so fixed things that his word was accepted, and he was let off paying his taxes. In this city there is a great deal of queer work being done to escape taxation. Our worthy mayor has determined to put a stop to that work. Of late years it had become a fortunate things to be a defaulting taxpayer. Why? because the matter would be brought up before a council committee and the back taxes would be remitted either in their entirety or in part. The assessor’s office also should be more stringent in the way it performs the duty. We can tell of several properties in this city that are not assessed to anything near their value. We will direct attention to the property, real and personal, of some of the ladies in the tenderloin district, and asked how is it that they are not assessed to their value? Poor men who have as much as they can do to pay for rent and food find that their little property is assessed to its full, or more than its full value. The picture on the first page of this issue needs no explanation; it is more truth than poetry.
January 12, 1895.