Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/123

 TARIFF REFORM

A YEAR and a half ago a gentleman who had just been reëlected, by Republicans, to the Senate of the United States, made a five-minute speech acknowledging the honor. In respect to public affairs he uttered but one opinion: that the people of the United States were confronted by a most serious problem, viz., how to reduce taxation. On the face of it, this was a most extraordinary statement, and the chronicler or historian might well take note of it as a new event in the life of the human race. Statesmen and historians are familiar enough with the difficulty of raising more revenue, and laying more taxes, but the solemn and calamitous position of a nation which is forced to reduce its taxes, and finds itself confronted by industrial disaster if it does it, is something new. Students of political economy are familiar with the question: What harm to industry may be done by levying taxes on it? But the problem of how to avert the economic disaster which may follow taking them off is new. Of course the state of mind revealed by the formulation of the above problem is the result of a long habit of regarding taxation as an industrial force, or, at least, as an effective condition of industrial success.

There is, however, a problem; in regard to that fact all concur. It is also a rare problem, one for which the only precedent is to be found in our own history, and when the case occurred before, it proved to be fraught with calamity. We are confronted by the dangers of a surplus revenue, and no proposal to do away with the surplus in extravagant