Worse and Worse by L. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Apr 20, 1905

“Worse and Worse”

By L. A. S.

THE climax of the exposures of governmental corruption now being described by Mr. Lincoln Steffens, is reached in the April issue of McClure’s, in which Mr. Steffens dwells at length upon the theme “New Jersey: A Traitor State.” While in other States, individually, political “graft” affects directly only the people of that State, in New Jersey it affects the people of all the States. “New Jersey,” Mr. Steffens says, “is selling out the rest of us.” New Jersey is the trust chartering State, and “she not only licenses companies to do in other States what those States would not license; she licenses them to do in those other States what she would not let them do in Jersey.” The citizens of New Jersey, while taxed to the limit of endurance, “pay no direct State tax; the corporations pay all the expenses of the State, and more.” And the people of the other States pay New Jersey’s expenses through these corporations. The history of legislative corruption in that State, Mr. Steffens shows, is largely a history of legislative control of the State by the railway interests, which Mr. Steffens traces, beginning with the Camden and Amboy in earlier times, down to the present ownership of the State by the Pennsylvania system. The railways which came into the State secured charters exempting them from county and local taxation, and as the railways increased in size and absorbed more of the property of the State, the burden of taxation fell more and more heavily on the citizens, until the amount of railroad property exempt from taxation amounted to more than one fourth of all property of the State, and the exemption represented an annual tax on the citizens of two million dollars.

Popular government in New Jersey, Mr. Steffens shows, is dead. The State “was turned over to the Republican party, which delivered it up to the Pennsylvania Railroad,” which governs for its own benefit and that of other roads and “interests.” What is called “pretty good government” by citizens in that State is, Mr. Steffens promises to show in a further article, their “share of the plunder of our business pirates who buy, cheap, her letters of marque, to prey not only on American business, but on the American character, and when caught at their crimes, sail for her ports to purchase, cheap, legislative immunity from our laws.” L. A. S.