66 ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS

With tax reform, and specifically the program we are proposing,
the State recognizes its obligation to assist in the protection of life
and property and would provide more than $15 million in the
very first year, and no less in succeeding years, for this purpose.

Number Six:

Without tax reform, or without drastically increasing property
taxes, it is impossible for the local subdivisions to keep up with
the current need for new school construction, the demand for
better teacher pay, or to seriously consider forward-looking in-
novations in the public school system.

With tax reform, we provide for new school construction, ex-
panded vocational-technical opportunities, kindergartens, and
keep faith with the teaching profession. Sixty-five million dollars
or more than 54 percent of all revenues collected under this
program is specifically earmarked for education.

Now I could go into the sevens and eights and nines of what tax
reform will mean to Maryland, but I think the main points have been
made.

Tax reform will do more than any single measure to remove from
the affairs of Maryland what George McGovern, the senator from
South Dakota, calls the "Crisis Mentality. " His outspoken thesis which
appeared in the January issue of The Atlantic states that it is not our
State but our national leadership that is to be censored for creating
crisis, spreading crisis, imagining crisis, and failing to recognize true
crisis where it truly exists.

It is good that Senator McGovern did not turn his pen to Mary-
land, for we, in the past, have ourselves been crisis makers and we
must vow it shall not happen again.

I'm not expecting every delegate of every county to accept every
detail of every section of the bill. There should be honest and in-
telligent debate on such an important and far-reaching measure.
Proper and perceptive analysis is not merely the prerogative but the
very duty of our elected representatives.

As Lincoln said: "The true rule, in determining to embrace, or
reject anything, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it
have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil
or wholly good. Almost every thing... is an inseparable compound of
the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between
them is continually demanded. "