Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/21

Rh city of Providence, R. I., was $379,000. In 1892 it was $2,333,000. In the former year the taxable real and personal estate was valued at $61,000,000, while for the year 1892 the valuation was $155,000,000. Thus the increase in the amount of taxes collected within the thirty years was five hundred and fifteen per cent, while in the amount of assessable property the gain was only one hundred and fifty-four per cent. The rate of tax increased during the same period from $6.50 per $1,000 to $15.

Among the leading nations of the world the comparative burden of exactions by Government is heaviest in Russia, Italy, and France. In Russia the present governmental exactions—under the name of taxes—from the agricultural peasant are reported to be about forty-five per cent of the value of his annual product or earnings. In Italy the State exaction is believed to absorb from one third to one half of the value of its agricultural product. The present aggregate of annual taxation in France is undoubtedly the greatest to which any country in modern times has been subjected; and including all taxes—national and local—is estimated as in excess of $1,400,000,000, or about one fourth of the annual income of its people. And yet it is claimed that the prosperity of the nation is increasing. There can, however, be no doubt that the financial strain caused by such great and continuous demands on the income of the French people is beginning to be severely felt; and in a recent budget discussion in the Senate of the republic, M. Loubet, chairman of its financial committee, insisted that taxation had reached its utmost endurable limit.

As far back as 1879 the taxation imposed by Spain on her island of Cuba was reported to have made the latter the most heavily taxed country in the world; the rate on its free population being then estimated as equal to $34.50 per capita.

The cost of the Government of Great Britain for 1893-'94 defrayed by what are termed imperial taxes—mainly customs and inland revenue, and deducting all items of compensating revenue—as receipts from crown lands, etc.—was £75,427,000. The