Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/348

316 The specific tax on distilled spirits of fifty cents per proof gallon remained in force from July, 1868, to August, 1872, a period of a little more than four years. During this period the tax was assessed and collected on an average production of 67,175,822 proof gallons per annum, yielding an average annual revenue of about $34,000,000, and indicating an average annual consumption for all purposes of the country of about $34,000,000, and indicating an average annual consumption for all purposes of the country of about 1·65 proof gallons per capita. For the period of four years immediately preceding the fiscal year 1869, under a tax of two dollars per proof gallon for three years, and a dollar and a half and two dollars for one year (1865), the tax was assessed and collected on an average annual production of only about 13,300,000 proof gallons per annum, yielding an average annual revenue of about $21,727,000, and indicating an average annual consumption of only about 0·38 proof gallon per capita.

But, notwithstanding these satisfactory results, the law authorizing the reduction of the tax from two dollars to fifty cents per proof gallon had hardly become operative when agitation commenced for its repeal or modification. Speculators had the idea that the old scheme of increasing the tax after a little lapse of time, without making the increase applicable to stocks on hand, was, with its gainful prospects, again within the range of possibilities; while very many extreme advocates of temperance, untaught by and caring nothing for the record of recent experience, were inclined to regard the new and comparatively low tax as impolitic and in the light of the removal of a barrier against the spread of intemperance. These and other arguments proved sufficiently potent, and in June, 1872, Congress, by an act which took effect in the following August, increased the gallon tax to seventy cents, and subsequently, in March, 1875, raised the rate to ninety cents per gallon, and in August, 1894, further increased it to a dollar and ten cents, the present rate.

It is not necessary to recall that the experiences which were attendant upon every advance of the tax on spirits from its first imposition in 1862 to 1868 were repeated subsequently in 1872 and in 1875, when the increased rates of seventy and ninety cents were respectively enacted; those of the latter date being remarkable from the circumstance that the frauds upon the revenue, which were enormous, were more directly brought home to high officials of the Government than at any former period, and constitute a chapter in the history of government by the people which the people may well wish forgotten.

The above review of the experiences of the United States prior to 1869, in attempting to enforce the collection of an excessively high tax on the production and consumption of distilled spirits, is mainly valuable in this connection from the economic and moral