Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/124

116 expenditures can stand before the common sense of the people.

If the taxes are collecting more than the public necessities require, then the simple and obvious, and, in fact, the only solution, is not to collect the taxes; let the people keep their own products and do what they please with them. If we do not make a problem there will not be any; if we simply do in the most straightforward manner what the common sense of the situation demands, there will be no difficulty; the consequences will all take care of themselves, and all the imaginary calamities will fail to appear. If, however, we must have a grand scheme of national prosperity established in advance, then the case is different.

During the war a notion grew up here that, through some new dispensation of fate, it was possible for the American people to make war and prosper by it. After the war the notion grew up that the paper money was a condition of success and that we should be ruined if we resumed specie payments. Now we are met by the doctrine that we cannot repeal the taxes which were laid during the war, partly in order to carry it on, because our national prosperity is bound up in them. These notions, in fact, are all consistent, and all hang together; they all belong to a philosophy that men prosper by discord and war, not by peace and harmony. According to that philosophy we touched unawares the springs of prosperity when we engaged in a civil war, incurred an immense debt, and laid crushing taxes. Now, therefore, when we ask that the taxes which are no longer necessary may be taken off, the men who have fallen under the dominion of these fallacies tell us that it cannot be done; that our prosperity would be undermined by it. They have been assuring us for years past that the protective system was sure to produce a solid and stable prosperity; now, by their own statement, it has produced a state of things so weak and unstable that it must be maintained