The matter itself stands thus, as the German newspaper called Welt reports today. Thorsten Frei, leader of the Union faction, asked by another newspaper, Bild by name, whether the citizens must tighten their belts next year, answered that it must be said plainly, because the treasury is in straits. He said further that he doubted whether that cold progression could be fully compensated in the year two thousand and twenty-seven; part of it, he said, will already be made good by the planned reform of the income tax. The Germans call it cold progression when wages swollen by inflation merely offset risen prices, yet a greater tax is exacted, so that the power of the money stays the same or shrinks. I do not fault the man's words: he chose to confess openly rather than dissemble. But let us examine the deed, not the words.

For what is this progression but a tax imposed without law? When the prices of all things rise and the coin grows cheap, the wage of labour stays the same, yet the same income, because it seems larger in number, is punished at a higher step: so it comes about that a citizen no richer pays more to the treasury. Who asked the people for this? What assembly passed it? What herald proclaimed it? No one. The treasury wrote its own bill and cast the people's vote for them. To let the coin grow cheap so that the tax silently grows is nothing else than to debase the denarius; and "the foundation of justice is good faith": the same goddess dwells in the coin and in the tax, and he who violates the one will not keep the other.

Someone will say: the straits of the treasury are real; what was to be done? Hear what our ancestors did. When the Gauls held the city and gold was sought for the ransom, the Roman matrons brought their ornaments unasked into the common stock; the senate, the city recovered, gave thanks and repaid the money. Again in the Hannibalic war, when the treasury was exhausted, each man offered what he had for the fatherland, asked openly, with the enemy standing at the gates. That is how the tax of free citizens is made: it is openly demanded, a just cause is shown, and it is repaid when affairs allow. But this cold levy is neither openly demanded nor ever repaid: taken once, it is taken forever.

And would that Frei, when he proclaims that the citizens must tighten their belts, first asked where that money went which had filled the treasury. Cassius, that judge whose prudence Cicero praised, "kept asking in his cases who had benefited." Let us ask too: who benefits when prices rise and the steps of the tax stand still? The treasury. Who suffers? The household that labours and saves. They say necessity compels; I ask who made the necessity. Surely it was not that citizen, now ordered to tighten his belt, who emptied the treasury: yet the bill is carried to the man who did not sit at the feast. A frugal people is not the purse of its magistrates.

The remedy lies at hand, and it is not new. First: let the steps of the tax follow prices by the law itself, so that, unless the people have been asked and have so voted, no one pays more than he paid before; the silent tax must be exiled from all law. Next: if true necessity presses, let the magistrates demand openly, show the cause, lay bare the figures, and let those who decree be the first to contribute, as is the custom of honourable houses, where in hard times the mistress lays down her own ornaments before she cuts the rations of the maids. Last, let them remember: our mothers gave their gold to oppose Hannibal, to discord never. To the fatherland that asks, we give with an open hand; to the treasury that silently steals, not a single coin.