Imagine the state of affairs if Maine and New Hampshire merged.

Their taxes are lower. Their incomes are higher and so are their SAT scores. They also have bragging rights to a more elevated mountain peak – Washington beats out Katahdin by more than a thousand feet. Census trends suggest that even with a mere one-fourth of our area, they’ll surpass us in population by the end of the decade.

Two days from now, for the 14th quadrennial time, they’ll beat us again. They’ll bask in the nation’s limelight when voting for a presidential nominee.

You don’t have to be a Maine chauvinist to wonder why we play second fiddle so often to our cousins to the west.

It must be that their Algonquin Indian Chief Passaconaway cast a curse on us from the very beginning, maybe as punishment for our having asserted rights to the coveted Seavey Island, that would become home to the “Portsmouth” Naval Shipyard located in our own Kittery.

How could this happen? Why do they do this to us? After all, we’ve furnished them with two of their most celebrated U.S. senators. One time U.S. Senate Majority Leader Styles Bridges and Senate President Pro Tem George Moses, though elected from New Hampshire, were both born and reared in our own Washington County.

The present congressman from its First District, Jeb Bradley, is a native of Rumford, while the Democratic nominee in the last two races for the same seat, Martha Fuller Clark, came from York, daughter of one of Maine’s more prominent political figures, Marion Fuller Brown.

The Granite State has trumped us in so much, the idea came over me the other day that maybe it would be better if we simply surrendered to their supremacy and merged with them.

Though this form of consolidation isn’t what Gov. Baldacci has in mind in his promotion of the concept within our own state, surely it would be greeted with favor by many.

The idea seemed so compelling that in a spontaneous Main Street encounter with my own state senator, Chandler Woodcock, I at last broached the idea. The good senator acknowledged the idea first with a polite grin, but quickly declared, “Tell me, counselor, if you were a resident of New Hampshire, would you vote to merge with Maine?”

Neither Sen. Woodcock nor myself answered the question in part because the outcome seemed so obvious to both of us, but the longer I lingered on the thought the more I realized that the resolution posed by the question might not be so problematic. Let’s dig a bit deeper, I thought, and see what there is in it for them and not just for us.

To begin with, if New Hampshire merged with Maine, they’d have the benefit of a much higher distribution of federal revenues than today. Right now, they only receive 71 cents on every dollar sent to Washington while we receive a whopping $l.33. Flatten that out and they’d be getting back more than they pump in right off the bat.

Then there’s the property tax, one levy that would be reduced for them if they joined forces with us. A $100,000 home there (if you can find one) pays $2,400 in tax while one here pays about $1,600. That’s a state-wide average, of course, and there are local variations within each state. In Lewiston and Portland, the figure is higher than the Granite State average, for example.

On democratic values, we certainly have a thing or two to bestow upon them even though they’re stealing our thunder in the presidential primary department. That’s because in Maine we have direct democratic veto and control over unpopular state laws while in New Hampshire they don’t. The Pine Tree state provides for citizen initiative and referendum while there’s no such option there.

Indeed, its Supreme Court ruled in l999 that its legislature didn’t have authority to seek voter approval of a state income tax even if the legislature voluntarily delegated to its citizens this option.

The combined state would also mean that New Hampshire would go from having the nation’s shortest coastline to having the longest and most scenic in the Northeast, from a mere 30 miles to more than 1,500.

On top of that, they’d move closer to having the longest stretch of the Appalachian Trail, an enhancement especially vital to New Hampshire in the wake of the humiliating collapse of their Old Man of the Mountain at Franconia Notch last year.

And the coup de grace for New Hampshire? Seizure of one of the most lucrative and geographically contentious islands in America, Kittery’s Seavey, home to the naval shipyard.

So much for the reasons why a New Hampshire voter might – just might mind you – vote to merge with Maine.

Once the new state was established, we’d still have to iron out a few inconsistencies in our laws and culture. Its libertarian live-free-or-else mode of living has given rise to legislation that has approved gay rights, the uninhibited ability of adults to drive without seat belts, to smoke in bars and restaurants. They also get to purchase fire works. They hunt without wearing orange. Maine permits none of these. Ah, the devil is in the details.

Then, I began to think of such trivial concerns as to where the new state capital would be located, who would pay for it and how to merge license plates mottoes. Not easy!

Then I woke up.

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