Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/20

10 cents per day assessed on sixty-five millions of people would amount to nearly eleven dollars per head per annum, or over seven million dollars for the entire country.

Finally, there has been one most serious and unfortunate mistake, which nearly all who have undertaken to discuss the principles and practice of taxation have been prone to make—a mistake, moreover, which more than all else is responsible for the opinion which has come so generally to prevail, that the subject of taxation, through lack of any fixed principles or axioms, does not as yet rise to the dignity of a science; and that its practice at the best can be but a sort of empiricism, to be varied in proportion to the strength which a Government possesses to enforce its enactments, or in proportion to the prejudices of the people who are to be called on for a contribution. The mistake consists in taking up the subject for investigation and discussion, if we may so express it, wrong end foremost; or in devoting time and effort to warring against abuses; or in attempting to show how certain forms of taxation commend themselves in respect to productiveness, freedom from personal inquisition, and economy in collection, and how others are to be avoided for contrary reasons; and in not attempting to inquire whether the whole subject was underlaid by any general laws in accordance with which the contributions which the State is compelled as a condition of its existence to exact of its citizens diffuse themselves; and which laws, being once determined, will constitute a certain and sure foundation on which practical administration can be based and conducted.

The fact that such laws exist and only await discovery may be predicated, as it were, from surface indications, in the form of a great variety of disconnected economic facts, with just as much of certainty as the miner who, picking up here and there in the beds of streams fragments of coal or ore which the elements have scattered, predicates that somewhere there must be a larger vein or deposit from which the fragments have been derived.

The aggregates of the sums required by the governments of the world for their support are annually increasing, but probably in no greater ratio than the increase in their wealth, or property rightfully subject to taxation; and in those states in which there is a marked and continued increase in the control of the forces of nature for production, the ratio of taxation to aggregate wealth undoubtedly tends to diminish.

That there are, however, some striking illustrations that seem to prove to the contrary, is not to be denied. Thus, we have a recent statement that the expenses of the city of Philadelphia in eight years have increased two hundred and thirty per cent, while the taxable valuation of property in the same time has increased only twenty-five per cent. In 1862 the aggregate taxation of the