But what must be the astonishment, when it appears, that, instead of reducing a tax on knowledge, you augment it!
Charles Sumner
The Public Record
Charles Sumner was an American lawyer and statesman who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1851 until his death in 1874. Before and during the American Civil War, he was a leading American advocate for the abolition of slavery, and after the war he was a key figure in the Reconstruction era, during which he and other Radical Republicans successfully fought to end slavery and ensure basic rights for Black Americans. He continued advocating for racial equality until his death, lobbying in his final days for a civil rights bill that served as a model for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Historians credit Sumner with coining the phrase "equality before the law," which he first used as part of an early attempt to integrate Boston's public school system.
gutenberg.org
As well impose a tax on the public school as on the public library.
Here public libraries are coming into being without number.
The Public Library of Boston and the Astor Library of New York are magnificent examples, which smaller towns are emulating.
Public libraries are springing up in all the Northern States.
They are now extending like a belt of light across the country.
They are a new Zodiac, in which knowledge travels with the sun from east to west.
They are public schools, where every book is a schoolmaster.
To tax such institutions now, for the first time, is a new form of that old enemy, a “tax on knowledge.” Such is my sense of their supreme value that I would offer them bounties rather than taxes.
In continuation of this same hospitality to knowledge, I wish to go still further, and relieve imported books of all taxes, so far as not inconsistent with interests already embarked in the book business.
For instance, let all books, maps, charts, and engravings printed before 1840 take their place on the free list.
The tax you impose adds to the burdens of scholars and professional men who need them.
And yet every one of these books, when once imported, is a positive advantage to the country, by which knowledge is extended and the public taste improved.
I regret that food or clothes are taxed, because the tax presses upon the poor.
Reduce all such taxes, rather than add to them.
In New England education from the beginning was at the public expense; and this has been for some time substantially the policy of the whole country, except so far as it was darkened by Slavery.
Therefore I insist, that, because we tax food and clothes for the body, this is no reason why we should tax food and clothes for the mind.
PRESIDENT,--There is no question of the exemption of those who are best able to pay these duties; it is simply a question of a tax on knowledge.
But does not the Senator bear in mind that he proposes to go further, and to depart from the great principle governing our institutions from the beginning of our history?
We never did undertake to fill the body or to clothe the body at the public expense.
I would aim to establish the principle which seems to have governed our fathers, and which is so congenial with republican institutions, that education and knowledge, so far as practicable, shall be free.
To make education and knowledge free, you must, so far as possible, relieve all books from taxation.
I have already said that I did not propose to interfere with any of the practical interests of the book trade; but, where those interests are out of the way, I insist that the great principle of republican institutions should be applied.
It is because I hearken to the needs of my country that I make this proposition.
I respect all the necessities of the people; but among the foremost are those of public instruction, and it is of those I am a humble representative on this floor.
Politicians like Charles Sumner
