tion to the law as it stands arises from the difficulty experienced everywhere in securing anything like an adequate valuation and return of personal property. Farm lands, town! lots and railroad property have always paid more than their just proportion of the burdens.

It is the almost complete failure to get personal and especially the intangibles upon the tax rolls, which has caused the inequalities and the lack of revenue.

One of the objections to the bill is the re-enactment of the law of 1899 providing in substance that if any person "shall sell all his personal property after it has been assessed and before the tax is paid thereon and shall not retain sufficient to pay said tax, the tax for that year shall be a lien upon such property and shall at once become due and payable, and the County Treasurer shall at once issue a tax warrant for the collection thereof." The act provides that property sold in the ordinary course of retail trade shall not be liable in the hands of the purchaser, but the enforcement of this provision will necessarily operate as a restraint upon trade, and the trouble and costs of the enforcement, in my opinion, will be out of all proportion to the amount of taxes collected. I may be mistaken. The next objection is to the provision that if the property of any tax payer be so seized by legal process as not to leave a sufficient amount exempt from levy and sale to pay the taxes thereon, the tax for that year shall at oncefall due and be paid from the proceeds of the sale, and providing further that all sheriffs and constables and city aldermen are to at once inform the county attorney of the making or attempted making of any sale or levy of attachment and removals of personal property, and it is made the duty of the county attorney forthwith to proceed to recover the tax.

Provisions of this character serve rather to encumber the statute books; or if attempted to be enforced, the game would not pay for the candle. If all the personal property taken

under writs of attachment in the state in any one year was sold at public auction, the entire sum realized would hardly warrant such a law-to say nothing of a pitiful four or five per cent by way of a tax. It is not the escape of the little leaks which is causing the trouble.

In the preface to the report published by the commission it is explained that by a simple provision the deputy assessors are all to be confirmed by the board of county commissioners, which we are informed "broadens the responsibility of the deputy assessors and prevents the county assessor's office being made a machine for patronage". Under the present law the deputy assessors in the cities of the first and second class are confirmed by the board of county commissioners, and if there are any cities of the first or second class where their appointments have not heretofore been the result of political favors and patronage it is something new.

Another objection to the proposed law is in the provision for the appointment of the tax commission by the Executive Council instead of by the governor. The power of appointing the provisional members to serve until the next election should, in my opinion, be lodged in the governor, instead of in the Executive Council. The latter plan simply belittles the office of governor, and takes from the responsible head of the executive department of the state a power which that office should exercise, if it is exercised at all.

Lastly, I would ask the authors of the proposed law what, if any reason, can be given why the power of assessing the property of telegraph, telephone, express and pipe lines is given to the tax commission, and the power of assessing the property of railroad and car companies is left with a board to be known as the board of railroad assessors? And why the provision is made that the board of railroad assessors is to be composed of the lieutenant governor, secretary of state, state treasurer,

auditor of state, attorney general, and the two tax commissioners?

If there is any reason why a lieutenant governor is any more qualified to assess the property of a railroad company than he would be to assess the property of an express company, or if he has, ex-officio, any particular qualifications for doing either, I wish the authors would enumerate.

The railroads of this state have not in the past escaped taxation. Their property is easily found and its value easily determined; and that railroad property has paid in Kansas more than its just proportion of the burdens of taxation, is apparent to any careful observer; but if there is need of a tax commission to supervise and equalize the assessment and valuation of property generally for the purpose of taxation, let us make the commission a strong one, by providing more members, and by providing for decent salaries, and then give it authority to act as a state board of equalization and to tax the property of railroads as well as that of telephone, express. and telegraph companies, and take, to that extent, the question of the assessment of railway property out of politics.

PARDONS AND PAROLES.

GOVERNOR W. E. STANLEY.

At all times correction and punishment have been deemed necessary in well organized government. There can be no government without law. Law is useless without its reasonable enforcement, and the enforcement of law would be impossible without some punishment for its violation. Society has felt the need of prisons, reformatories and houses of correction quite as imperatively as it has felt the need of churches. and schools. Not to the same extent, perhaps, but in some degree it has deemed them just as essential.

Our public schools recognize this fact and have provided a system of merits and demerits, reaching from substantial class honors on the one hand to suspension and even expulsion on the other, to encourage and stimulate observation of school discipline and discourage its infraction. Even the home recognizes this principle, and there are very few well regulated homes, where, in the raising of children, some form of punishment is not administered for disregard of parental authority. This runs all the way from infliction of corporal punishment to withholding some privilege or favor, but in all forms of administration we find a recognition of the principle of reward for right doing and punishment for wrong doing.

Many reasons are assigned for the infliction of punishment by the state, the chief among which are punishment for the

wrong committed and the correction and reformation of the wrong doer.

Punishment ought to follow the violation of the law, as a matter of course, and, except in very aggravated cases, the certainty of punishment rather than the extent of it, is the thing to be desired. The punishment ought in some measure to be commensurate with the offense committed, and in this, we find some of the difficulty attendant upon the enforcement of the criminal statutes.

If the punishment ought to be commensurate with the offense committed, then some way should be devised by which the punishment in one community would be about the same as that in another community for the same offense committed under like circumstances; but this is not the case, and it seems difficult to suggest or devise a plan by which this may be done. Take, for instance, one of the most common of offenses, that of larceny. The punishment for grand larceny, under our statute, is confinement and hard labor for a term not exceeding five years. A person is convicted in one district for stealing a watch of the value of $25, and is sentenced by the presiding judge to confinement at hard labor for a term of five years the limit of the statute. In another district, a person is convicted of stealing a watch of the same value, under exactly similar circumstances, and the presiding judge in that district sentences him for a period of one year,—the minimum sentence provided by the statute. If punishment should be adequate to the offense committed, it would seem that in the cases I have cited, there is something wrong, which, as I have already said, I see no means of correcting, and the first case would probably be a proper one for executive interference.

Another illustration: Two persons are charged with burglary and larceny, in entering a dwelling in the night time and taking goods under circumstances which would constitute burglary in the first degree. The evidence at the trial dis