NOTEBOOK

been taken. Suppose God had levied this tax upon the
incomes of the rich. How long would it have remained in
force? A week? Try to imagine rich, Godly Englishmen
paying from £10,000 to $800,000 to the church and mak-
ing no murmur, raising no hell about it. What a pity God
didn't levy the tax upon the rich alone. 7 would. How-
ever, He knew the rich couldn't be forced to pay it and
the poor could. With all his brutalities and stupidities and
grotesqueries that old Hebrew God always had a good
business head. He always stopped talking shop (piousness,
sentiment, sweetness in life) and came right down to
business when there was a matter concerning shekels on
hand. His commercial satisfaction in the clink of shekels
runs all through his Book—that Book whose "every word"
He inspired and whose ideas were all his own; among
them the idea of levying a one-tenth income tax upon
paupers. We hear a great deal about the interior evidences
of the "Divine Origin" of that Book. Yes; and yet the
tithe tax could have originated in hell if interior evidences
go for anything.

April 12, 1887. Day before yesterday I encountered
Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe on the sidewalk. She took
both my hands and said with strong fervency that sur-
prised the moisture into my eyes—"I am reading your
Prince and Pauper for the fourth time, and I know it is
the best book for young folks ever written."

May 17, 1887. Depew told this last night at the dinner
at Charles A. Dana's house: "Greeley turned on the man
who was collecting money 'to save millions of your fellow
creatures from going to hell,' and remarked—'I won't give
you a damned cent. There don't half enough of them go
there now.'"

1887. Next May write Prof. Francis Wayland that I am

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