The New Orleans Bulletin

The city charter requires that the collection of city taxes shall begin on the 1st of March and close on the 15th July. Under a law, which, it is alleged, was passed by the Kellogg Legislature, at the solicitation of the Council, Mr. Schneider, the Administrator of Finance, the "great investigated," ordered the collection to commence on the 18th of May, and to close on the 18th of the present month.

Let us see how fair the Council and Mr. Schneider are, and whether their action in this matter is defensible. There are, in round figures, 25,000 bills to be collected, and the parties to transact this business are four clerks in the finance department, who work from 9 o'clock A. M. to 3 o'clock P. M. Now, allowing five minutes for the collection of each bill—and some of them will take at least fifteen minutes—each clerk would collect seventy-two bills per day, and all of them would collect per day two hundred and eighty-eight bills, presuming that they work without the slightest intermission. A very simple calculation will show that the greatest number of bills that could be collected in Mr. Schneider's office in the time designated would be 8064, or about one-third of the 25,000. It becomes an interesting question as to who is to profit most by the non-collection by the Administrator of the vast amount of tax bills that could not be collected with the present force, even if the people were willing and anxious to pay.