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AUTOMOBILES NOT A LUXURY It illustrates the curious apartness from common life and knowledge so often shown by our legislators that in Washington they have not yet noticed or have not yet realized that the automobile lias al ¬ ready come to be a vehicle like another that now in its various and many forms it is just as much a utility and no more a luxury than are horse drawn carriages wagons and trucks trucksFor For no reason except this failure of lawmakers to keep up with the times can it be that in pre ¬ paring the new revenue bill the very first though of everybody engaged in the task has been to put on automobiles of every sort a tax that will be burdensome in every case and prohibitive in not a few That it may be necessary as the war goes on through taxation to restrict the use of auto ¬ mobiles to real work is not unlikely It has already been done in Europe and what can properly be called pleasure rilling ceased there long ago But the European laws were passed and enforced out of necessity not on the assumption that automobiles were the toys of the rich and that the more they were driven off the roads the better it would be As a matter of fact the automobile to the large degree in which it has taken the place of horses deserves the same treatment and respecf that horses do and if pleasure riding should be taxed nobody would complain if it were the impost should be laid without regard to the nature of the motive power employed The motor truck is no more a luxury or less of a necessity than is the truck drawn by horses on which it is an improvement in so many ways As much as can be said for all the other kinds of engined vehicles whether they are luxuries or not depends on the use made of them As for the saving of gasoline whatever the war wants of course it must and will have all if it wants all But the notion that there is something vicious something that might be called essentially nonessential about automobiles as distinguished from other vehicles is one that exists only in legis ¬ lative halls and it is as absurd there as it would l e anywhere else There is nothing peculiar about the automobile except its modernity New York Times
