Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 11.djvu/309

Rh been the large one of the characterization of the essential life of the commonwealth. However, as the subject in hand is the restricted one of the presentation of the financial means in their relation to the commonwealth's life, it was thought advisable as a first step to bring these financial means into view through the discussion of taxation and of the use of the state lands.

These finances thus brought into view should now be made a tell-tale. A system of taxation rightly presented should have illustrated the ideas and sense of social justice of a people and its skill in adjusting the burden of the support of common interests, and the discussion of a state's land policy should have exhibited its thought pertaining to the common welfare as affected in land-ownership ; but a discussion of the expenditures of the revenues obtained from these sources should yield a yet deeper insight into the essential life of the commonwealth. The relative proportions of the different lines of expenditure give comparative measures of the community's interests along these lines, or at least the relative extents to which these several interests are appreciated. The total public expenditures in their ratio to the total resources of the people in their annual collective incomes, measure the collective interests that the people unite to promote. The growth of the public expenditures in a like manner exhibits the pace of expansion of the common needs and activities — or at least the proportion of the social income the people have a mind to divert to them. These are some of the characteristic purposes to be served through an examination of the development of the public expenditures of Oregon.

Modern political communities do not, however, in their public expenditures limit themselves to what they can afford to divert from their current social incomes. Conditions develop in a state, either of imminent danger to public safety or of possible public advantage in the creation of great permanent improvements, that call for the immediate command by the government of extraordinary amounts of revenue,—