Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 615]

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Address to the Citizens of Morgan County

575

termine. This amount is not large when compared with the great and rapidly increasing amount of taxable wealth in the county. There are 368,000 acres of land in the county. Allowing 68,000 acres as waste land (which is greatly in excess of the fact) and we have a tax of only one dollar per acre on the lands of the county, to create an interest which will at once raise their value many times that amount. It must not be forgotten that much of the county tax is upon other property than lands, which still further reduces the per centum on this species of property. All the tax paid by merchants, bankers, and indeed all taxes upon town property, reduce the burden resting upon the lands. And so much of the lands are held at high prices—prices in some degree made high by interests like the one we are advocating— that, upon much of the lands of the county, valued as low as thirty dollars per acre for instance, the tax would really amount to but few cents per acre. We have taken some pains to ascertain, from the best judges, the most correct estimate of the actual wealth of the county; and an average of the most reliable opinion we can obtain would fix it at about twenty-five millions of dollars ($25,000,000). jfThus the entire tax contemplated is only about one cent and two mills on the dollar in the whole, and this spread over, say three years of assessment! Can there be any person who would regard this as a burden too great for the county, considering the rapid increase in property values ? And is there any one who doubts that before the last installment was levied the property assessed would have increased five-fold the amount of the taxK.Cannot the comity bear so small a tax on its vast resources for the sake of such a boon as is now offered us? Dropping from sight all the great moral, social and intellectual advantages of the institution to any county, and only looking to its immediate effect as a mailed speculation on our real estate, is there a man of good financial abiUtgr in Morgan County who does not believe that the bare fact of the location of such an institution in our county, b^or^ey^iite. corner stone is laid, would not raise the price of land quite as much as we have stated. But among those who would discourage action in regard to the location of this institution in the County of Morgan, it may