But these are considerations of but little importance in the eye of your petitioners, in comparison with others, the consequence of this; unnatural connection in which our interests are deeply involved. We contend and we expect to prove to the satisfaction of the committee that we pay into the town treasury a much larger amount than is expended upon us. This is not idle assertion grounded on loose conjecture the rantings of a heated imagination, but a truth which we conceive to be incontrovertible. By the assessors books of 1823, the amount of taxes in the westerly section amounted to a fraction over $3,500. The expenditures in the same section during the same year (according to the printed account and other authentic sources) amounted to somewhat short of $1,100. This, the committee will discover, is not one-third part of the amount paid in, but we are aware that there are some other expenditures, such as our proportional part of the salaries of town officers and support of poor, which ought to be taken into this account, but after everything is included which the most scrupulous could suggest, we are confident the result will be decidedly in our favor. So sure are we of this that we challenge our opponents to prove the contrary. Nor do we admit that we are contending for a trifle, for although we do not pretend that we can accurately ascertain the precise sum which we shall save by this change, yet we are sanguine it will not amount to less than from one-third to one-half of our present burthens. As this is an important point to sustain, I shall proceed to state some of the causes which produce this inequality. The two sections are altogether different in their occupations, views, and habits—the lone is a seaport, the other an agricultural community: the one by its contiguity with Boston imitates the
