Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/340

308 the creation of supervisory districts and the appointment of supervisors; the origination of the use of stamps for the collection of taxes on distilled spirits, fermented liquors, tobacco, and the sales of stockbrokers (the last in place of a general tax of one twentieth of one per cent on sales); and the creation and organization of the Bureau of Statistics as a branch of the national Treasury. These modifications brought the internal revenue duties within a reasonable compass, introduced systems where the want of it was working mischief, and by their ready application in administration reconciled the people to a maintenance of important sources of revenue and a continuance of taxes, which have by their stability and steady increase enabled the Government to meet financial exigencies otherwise awkward and dangerous. The service thus rendered met with recognition at the time both in and out of Congress, and was strongly indorsed by those most interested—the head of the Treasury and the industries taxed.

The work of taking down the vast and complicated structure of internal taxation, which had been built up during the war, having been once seriously entered upon by Congress (in 1866), it was prosecuted so vigorously that in the comparatively short space of three years the aggregate annual receipts from such taxes were reduced from $310,906,000 in 1866 to $160,039,000 in 1869—a reduction of $150,865,000—and to $102,644,000 in 1872, a further reduction of $57,395,000; while the sources of revenue, the annual receipts from each one of which were specifically reported, were reduced from about two hundred and seventy-five in 1866 to nominally sixty-six in 1872; but practically to three—distilled spirits, fermented liquors, and tobacco—the receipts from which alone in 1893 were $150,865,000 as compared with $91,464,000 in 1872. It should, however, be noted that this remarkable increase of revenue, coincident with a large reduction in the number of taxed articles, was due mainly to an increase of consumption consequent upon an increase of population during the period under consideration (26,230,000) rather than to any