Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/69

Rh revenue officials, purchased square pieces of ivory for a few pence and marked them for themselves. As regards packs of cards, the regulations imposed by a number of complicated acts of Parliament were so stringent that legally cards could scarcely be made or sold. Nevertheless for many years cards were hawked about the streets unstamped and without a license; and the manufacture of cards for exportation was so flourishing that nearly half a million packs were estimated to be surreptitiously made for exportation at the time the obnoxious taxes were repealed."

Sixth. No tax should be levied the character and extent of which offer, as human nature is generally constituted, a greater inducement to the taxpayer to evade rather than pay.

The justification and wisdom of the above maxim find support in a lesser degree from argument than from experience, although the deductions from abstract reasoning ought alone to constitute its sufficient indorsement. It has been pointed out by Herbert Spencer that ideal men are possible only in an ideal state; and, conversely, that a perfect social state is possible only when every unit has achieved perfection. As this condition has not been attained, and until the "millennium" arrives is not likely to be, the inference is legitimate that a large proportion of mankind are not "decently honest," inasmuch as in every variety of business where opportunity for the perpetration of fraud exists, much labor is expended in guarding against dishonesty. This is specially exemplified in the case of railroads, "where tickets have to be dated, punched, and carefully collected to prevent their being used again by the masses."

But it is in matters of taxation that the largest amount of irrefutable evidence is to be found in support of the above maxim. Thus in the case of smuggling or the evasion of duties on imports, the experience of all governments and of almost all countries is to the effect, that when sufficient inducement in the way of gain from a violation of the law is offered, such statute can not be executed even when penalties as severe as death have been made contingent on individual arrest and conviction. But it has been reserved for that nation whose people claim to be the most law-abiding and intelligent, to furnish the most confirmatory evidence on this subject—namely, the United States—the Congress of which in 1865 imposed a tax on distilled spirits amounting to more than fifteen hundred per cent on the then average prime cost of production. The result was, that the Government was only able in 1868 to collect the tax on less than seven million gallons out of an annual product of certainly not less than fifty million gallons; which last, sold as it undoubtedly was at the current market price (tax included), left to the credit of popular corruption at least $80,000,000.