Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/748

726 for all public expenditures involving taxation during the term that it is in office; and that to permit private members or political opponents to propose expenditure of the public moneys would not only transfer responsibility from those .who ought to bear it, but would lead to great financial disorder and vast and inexpedient expenditures. The great mass of the civil servants of the British Government are also strictly excluded from seats in Parliament, and until recently were debarred from voting for members; the reason for such provisions being that those who have personal interest in taxation because they have improvable property or incomes from taxes, ought to have no voice, direct or indirect, in the imposition of taxes, on the same principle that judges are considered disqualified for trying cases in which they may have or are presumed to have any personal interest. On the other I hand, in the Federal Congress, where lavish and unexpected grants of public money are constantly made on motions of members not connected with any finance committee, and acting avowedly in behalf of private or local, rather than public, interests; and where the authorization of expenditures is divided among a number of committees so that no group of men is responsible for the aggregate appropriations; it is obviously not; within the power of the executive department of the Government to present and adhere to any previously well-considered scheme of annual taxation and expenditure, or what in most other countries is known as an annual budget.

The following record of recent experiences, which probably could not happen in the legislature of any other civilized country, strikingly illustrates the senseless and costly way in which the fiscal policy of the United States is not infrequently determined. During a comparatively recent fiscal debate in the United States Senate, a Senator advocated certain proposed appropriations of the public money, which were opposed on the ground that they were in the nature of extravagances, by saying that they could not be grievous to the people, "since they would not amount to more than three cents per day per capita." But three cents per day would amount to nearly eleven dollars per head per annum, or over fifty-five dollars for every family of five persons, and there are millions of men and millions of families in the United States whose income is not a dollar a day. Again, how many of the American people are aware that a bill proposing to grant pensions to seventy thousand ex-slaves, on the ground that they were chiefly instrumental in developing the wealth of the country, is reported to be now pending in the United States Senate? Such a bill, if once passed, would establish the principle of pensions for civil service, and by swelling the existing pension list to an inordinate amount would almost justify the assumption, that the