National Affairs: WE ARE MET ON FORM 1040

A taxpayer's parody of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has been going the rounds:

"One score and 19 years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this nation a new tax, conceived in desperation and dedicated to the proposition that all men are fair game. Now we are engaged in a great mass of calculations, testing whether this taxpayer, or any taxpayer so confused and so impoverished, can long endure.

"We are met on Form 1040. We have come to dedicate a large portion of our income to a final resting place with those men who here spend their lives that they may spend our money. It is altogether anguish and torture that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot evade, we cannot cheat, we cannot underestimate this tax. The collectors, clever and sly, who compute here, have gone far beyond our poor power to add and subtract.

"Our creditors will little note nor long remember what we pay here, but the Bureau of Internal Revenue can never forget what we report here.

"It is not for us, the taxpayers, to question the tax which the Government has thus far ignobly spent. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these vanishing dollars we take increased devotion to the few remaining—that we here highly resolve that next year will not find us in the higher income bracket, that this taxpayer, underpaid, shall figure out more deductions, and that this tax of the people, by the Congress, for the Government, shall not cause solvency to perish."