Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/478

436 books and pamphlets, exclusive of congressional speeches and newspaper articles, have been issued from the American press; fourth, the "Free Trade" and "Protection" question; fifth, the monetary metallic standard question; sixth, the relations of the State to common carriers, and the methods of internal intercommunication; seventh, the subject of local or State as contradistinguished from national or Federal taxation; on which latter topic, although it relates to methods by which the people of the United States at present annually contribute to local or State governments a sum nearly equal to the present total annual revenue of Great Britain from all imperial taxes, there had not been up to 1870, a single publication in the United States apart from official reports that pretended intelligently to discuss it. Since this date, however, a much greater interest has been manifested on this subject. Several publications of great merit, exhibiting the situation in its legal aspects, and the theories, controversies, and experiences of the past, have appeared; and this interest has been especially intensified and popularized by the scheme of the so-called "single tax," which, if not originated by Mr. George, has been so ably advocated by him as to have attracted, previous to the development of the silver problem, more of popular attention on both sides of the Atlantic than any other economic topic brought forward during the present century.

Some better acquaintance with the literature of taxation than has hitherto been acquired by most educated men would seem to be essential to a full understanding of many of the great events in the world's history, inasmuch as nearly all great political revolutions have been primarily occasioned by the exercise of arbitrary power in compelling contributions of property from the masses by those in authority. Thus, going back to ancient history, the disruption of the Jewish monarchy and the secession of the ten