The Tax Swindle: How Seattle’s Printer Defrauded His Neighbors

Upon our exposition of an infamous robbery of the tax-payers in this county by collusion between the tax-collecters and the printer of the Intelligencer, this young jackanapes in jacket-and-trousers impertinently volunteers false witness for the thieves and a malicious assault upon us... He says we ran a 'rat' printing establishment in San Francisco; are 'ratting' now in the publishing business; advertising at Chinamen's wages,' and because a fellow publisher gets a mite of patronage for which he can charge rates—just ones too—snows such an intense jealousy as to bring upon himself the contempt of not only printers but of everybody else... This is the transaction which the 'small boy of the Argus' rushes into print to defend... actuated only by aboyish vanity to make himself apparent as an editor.

The charges which we denounced were two dollars and fifty cents a description, averaging from two to three lines in large type, for three publications. The highest advertised rates of the Intelligencer... are two dollars per square... At these highest rates, a square containing six descriptions would have amounted to four dollars; by the usual rates charged for legal advertising, to two dollars for the three weeks publication... The charge of the Intelligencer was fifteen dollars per square of six descriptions—an overcharge of eleven dollars to four upon its highest advertised rates, and thirteen dollars to two upon its usual rates for legal advertising. This flagrant swindle upon the tax-payers, was, in the delinquent school tax, levied to collect a small special tax amounting in a majority of cases to less than thirty cents each... The Shen's delinquent tax sale, charged at the same rates for advertising, amounted to nearly, or quite, twice as much; the two aggregating not far from fifteen hundred dollars—an overcharge of not less than one thousand dollars—probably more than the entire receipts of the office for a year.