President Hayes expressed great solicitude as to the future
fortunes of this people. In his retirement he had been watching the
tendency of political and social purposes and events. He had observed
how in recent years the possessors of political power had been learning
to use it for the first time for the promotion of social and personal
ends. He said to me, "You will probably live to see the day when in the
case of the death of any man of large wealth the State will take for
itself all above a certain prescribed limit of his fortune and divide
it, or apply it to the equal use of all the people, so as to punish the
rich man for his wealth, and to divide it among those who, whatever may
have been their sins, at least have not committed that." I looked upon
it as the wanderings of a dreaming man; and yet if I had known that
within less than five short years afterwards I should be standing before
this tribunal to contest the validity of an alleged act of Congress, of
a so-called law, which was defended here by the authorized legal
representatives of the Federal Government upon the plea that it was a
tax levied only upon classes and extremely rich men, I should have given
altogether a different heed and ear to the warnings of that
distinguished statesman.
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