Teacher: "What is a tax?"

Child: "A tax is the money we agree to pay to keep up our common
advantages."

Teacher: "Why do we all pay taxes?"

Child: "Because the country belongs to all of us, and we must all pay
our share to keep it up."

Teacher: "In what proportion do we pay taxes?"

Child: "In proportion to how much money we have." (_Sotto voce_: "Of
course!")

Teacher: "What is it to evade taxes?"

Child: "It is treason." (_Sotto voce_: "And a dirty mean trick.")

In masculine administration of the laws we may follow the instinctive
love of battle down through the custom of "trial by combat"--only
recently outgrown, to our present method, where each contending party
hires a champion to represent him, and these fight it out in a wordy
war, with tricks and devices of complex ingenuity, enjoying this kind of
struggle as they enjoy all other kinds.

It is the old masculine spirit of government as authority which is so
slow in adapting itself to the democratic idea of government as service.
That it should be a representative government they grasp, but