Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/322

 306 in the city of Rochester, N. Y., to provide side paths along the country roads for bicyclists.

In the early part of the present year the newspapers of the city made the surprising announcement one morning that there had just passed the State Legislature and been placed in the hands of the Governor for approval a bill to tax all bicyclists in Monroe County one dollar each, the fund thus raised to be devoted to the construction of side paths. I say surprising advisedly. Although it was afterward learned that seven or eight thousand bicyclists out of the twenty thousand in the county had signed petitions for the bill, scarcely any public mention of it had been made, and no public discussion of it had taken place. The newspapers went so far as to charge that it had been "sneaked" through the Legislature. While the charge was false, it illustrates for the thousandth time how important legislation may be had without the knowledge of the community it affects.

Besides an indiscriminate imposition of the tax on all bicyclists, whether living in the city or country, or whether they would have occasion or not to use the paths, the bill called into existence the customary political machinery to execute it. There were to be five side-path commissioners, appointed by the Board of Supervisors, and to serve five years. They were to determine the paths to be built, to decide how they should be built, to let contracts, and to issue orders on the county treasurer, the collector of the tax, for the payment of work. The most odious feature of the bill was the provision that the tax "should be a lien on the cycle taxed"; that in case of nonpayment the collector should "proceed to enforce said tax by seizing the cycle" and "selling the same at public auction to the highest bidder"; that the proceeds of such sale should be applied toward the payment of the tax and the incidental expenses, including the two-dollar fee to the collector.

In the heated discussion that followed the publication of these provisions, the usual arguments in favor of such legislation were brought forward. The most comprehensive as well as the most familiar was the "general-welfare" argument. This was the fine product of a clerical mind unable to appreciate the full significance of the golden rule and the commandment against covetousness. The argument of a distinguished physician, equally destitute of a keen appreciation of the rights of those bicyclists that might never have time to take an excursion into the country, was that "this plan is the only feasible solution of an extremely difficult problem." He said that it was "the outcome of careful consideration by the older and conservative wheelmen of the city, and not the scheme of the road riders, so called." He went to the extent of claiming most erroneously that "the opponents of the