Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/23

Rh A recent English writer has claimed that the experience in reference to taxation of the forty-five anomalous sovereignties which now make up the United States [none subordinate to a national Government except to a limited extent and in respect to particular questions], has thrown a great light upon the temper of democracies. "Half a century ago every thinker predicted that the one grand evil of democracy would be meanness; that it would display an 'ignorant impatience of taxation,' and that it would refuse supplies necessary to the dignity, or at least to the visible greatness, of the state." That prediction has, however, proved itself, not only by the experience of the United States, but also of the leading countries in Europe, to be the exact contrary of the facts. "The lower the suffrage, the higher the budget mounts. Democracy loves spending, is devoted to dignity, and, provided they are indirect, or fall heaviest on the rich, will pay any amount of taxes. The English democracy with household suffrage, though it has reduced its debt, has increased its budget, increased rates all over the country, and would not be frightened to-morrow if a great socialistic experiment were to cost it a hundred millions. It hardly shudders when it is asked to support in comfort, at a cost of about £17,000,000 ($85,000,000), its whole aged poor. The French democracy has nearly doubled its taxation and raised its debt more than a third, apart from the tribute paid to Germany. The German democracy, with enlarged suffrage, a poor soil, and nearly universal poverty, is always granting new demands, whether for soldiers, ships, colonies, or centralized officials."

But it is in the United States, with universal suffrage and the richest of estates, that the extravagance of government expenditures, sustained by taxation, rises to a point which fiscal experts, like Alexander Hamilton, Robert J. Walker, and Albert Gallatin in the United States, and Sir Robert Peel or Ricardo in England, could not have been persuaded to believe possible. Either of them would have declared an American pension list amounting to $155,000,000 (£31,000,000) a year too absurd for credence, and would have criticised the prophet who made the prediction for his poverty of invention.

That the interests benefited by national extravagance will, under free suffrage, always constitute a formidable obstacle to judicious tax reform, especially if such reform contemplates national economizing, can not well be doubted; and also that this opposition will be re-enforced to some extent by a popular feeling that something of color and dignity will go out of national life by any marked curtailment of the expenditures of the State. On the other hand, the political supremacy of the United States confessedly yet resides in its agricultural classes, who more than any