CAUSES OF BUSINESS DEPRESSION.
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pay any rent at all, for five per cent, would be too small toinduce a business at all in this country. . . .
“ Exemption of personalty will lighten the burdens of tax-ation on real estate, and after a short time the rate of taxationwill be really less. A short time ago a real estate owner ofMemphis said to me : ‘ Do you say that a merchant or bankershall make from ten to sixteen per cent, on his capital, andpay no tax, and I make only six or eight per cent, on thehouses the merchant and the banker are occupying, and pay allthe tax ? ‘Yes,’ said I; ‘you seek to tax them, and that is thereason you get no larger per cent, on your property. I say, ifthey make one hundred per cent, per annum on their capital,you should not want them to pay a copper of tax. Why ?Because if they made it you would have forty applicants forthe house they are doing business in ; and if you should, youwould certainly get a full rent for it, more than the extra tax,as only one of the forty could get it, and the other thirty-nine would be unaccommodated. And if your tenants shouldbe making this large per cent, it is reasonable to presume thatmen would be making something near it all over town. Butas only the present tenants, or their number, could be accom-modated with houses, the result would be that you would notonly get exorbitant rents for all the houses in town, but youwould have demand for the hundreds of thousands of vacantlots throughout the city, to build storehouses on ; they wouldbuy them, or offer you such enormous rents as would induceyou to build them houses on lots that you have been payingtaxes on for years, and received no rental from. Soon therewould be houses going up all over the city, block after block.The brickmaker, the lumberman, the carpenter, the bricklayer,and all descriptions of mechanics and laborers would havemore than they could do, so that the builders would have tosend elsewhere for mechanics. All these newcomers in turnwould want residences, and thus you would bring into demand