You don’t have to be an American to file for a fraudulent tax refund with the IRS. You don’t even have to be in America. I’m imagining huge overseas sweatshops filled with children with stubby pencils and poor lighting conditions filling out 1040 forms all day long as their bosses make millions mining the U.S. Treasury.
The opposition of the Friends… extended not only to actual participation in
war, but to paying war taxes, subscribing to tests of allegiance, and
supplying provisions to the army, except where the purpose was to relieve
suffering and not to advance the national cause. They were very radical, and
could see no distinction between taking part themselves and paying someone
else to do their work. They had probably gone beyond the state wherein they
could say, in the favorite words of the Quaker assemblymen of thirty years
before, “While we do not, as the world is now circumstanced, condemn the use
of arms by others, we are principled against bearing arms ourselves.” Their
attitude, however, cannot be fully understood if we look upon them as
testifying merely against war. They had always claimed, in the old English
days of suffering, that they were different from most other dissenters,
because under no circumstances could they plot against the king. They would
suffer indefinitely rather than obey an unrighteous law, but no Quaker, no
matter how outrageously he was treated, was ever in any conspiracy against
the existing government. The revolutionary movement was a plot against the
recognized English authority. It was not their method of resistance to
tyranny, and they would not touch it or support it. When peace was declared,
all their sense of unwavering allegiance was transferred to the new
government, and they had no rancor stored up against its exponents, though it
required years to live down the reciprocal feeling towards themselves.
Unquestionably, they were very unpopular with the mass of the people of
strong American sympathies during the war, and those who controlled the
political destinies of the State of Pennsylvania did nothing to shield them.
On the contrary, they turned upon a number of men, who were undoubtedly
honest and conscientious, the terrors of jails, fines and serious distraint
of goods, for their unwillingness to take part in the revolutionary
proceedings. The Meeting for Sufferings reported distraints amounting to
£9,500 in . By the end of the war, the
aggregate reached at least £35,000. The demand to subscribe to the test of
allegiance to the State of Pennsylvania was followed at first by
imprisonment, which served to show that some Quakers at least were made of
the same unconquerable stuff as their ancestors of a century before. Three of
them were kept in Loncaster jail for fifteen months for this cause, and when
finally ordered to be released they refused to pay the jailer’s fees, for
they said they were convicted neither by their consciences nor by any fair
trial, so they would not contribute to the expenses of the iniquitous
imprisonment. They were, however, released.
The law, which filled the prisons and yet added nothing to the coffers of the
government, was unsatisfactory, so it was abolished, and fines imposed to be
collected by distraint. In one Quarterly Meeting (Western) over $68,000 was
in this way levied ,
for the collections went on long after the war was over. In
the Yearly Meeting could say: “The
sufferings of Friends in these parts have much increased, and continue
increasing in a manner which to outward prospect looks ruinous.”
