Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/12

2 taxation is to our body politic what blood is to the body physical: if healthy, infusing life and warmth; but if unhealthy, the agent for producing discontent, decrepitude, and paralysis.

The absence or existence of limitations on the power of a government to make compulsory levies on the property or persons of its people for its use or support, constitutes the dividing line between a despotism and a free government—a fact most pertinent to legal, economic, and societary studies which has attracted little attention.

The methods and scope of what is called taxation regulate more than all other agencies the distribution of wealth, which is really the great question of the future to all nations. Ever since Adam Smith wrote his paramount work on the Wealth of Nations the political economists and students of social science have concerned themselves mainly with the production of wealth. That problem has been practically solved. Wealth is now produced with a rapidity that the world had never before supposed possible, and the laws governing its production have become well understood by those who have made a special study of the subject. An inevitable result of this condition of affairs has been, that wealth produced under the greater control that man in general has obtained over the forces of Nature has aggregated itself, as it always will, in the hands of those whose faculties especially qualify them to obtain and manage it, and who, in common parlance, have received the name of "money-getters." These have become enormously rich, while the masses, whose material condition is also absolutely much better than at any former period of the world's history, are, however, relatively poorer. Improved facilities for transportation have greatly facilitated intercommunication, and the opportunity thus afforded for the observation of extreme contrasts in individual conditions has operated as a very great factor in occasioning discontent among the masses, who by reason of the