Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/789

Rh is finally abandoned; while his workmen are discharged, the village where the shop is located runs down, the artisans, shopkeepers, and professional men connected with it complain of hard times and emigrate from the locality or the country, while the railroad fails to confer all the benefit to the community or profit to its stockholders that might be possible. B, on the other hand, exempt from the tax, keeps on working, and when hard times come continues his sales and the occupations of his workmen by taking five per cent profits instead of ten, and selling his goods, as he can afford to, at reduced prices to meet temporary conditions. Actual practical illustrations of the injustice and disaster consequent on such discrimination in respect to tax burdens and exemptions are afforded on a small scale in the history of much railroad management, and to a larger extent where two nations with different systems of taxation undertake to compete with each other in the sale of the products of their labor in the common markets of the world. We find here an explanation also of the immediate beneficial effects which attended the first tentative measures of reform in the British tariff instituted by Sir Robert Peel in 1842 and 1845, which, although consisting mainly in the removal of numerous small but obstructive duties, nevertheless started British industry forward by leaps and bounds, even before the larger burdens of tariff restrictions were removed in later years.

As the characterizations of "poll," "head," or "capitation" taxes, the only possible form of direct taxation on a person, and of the advantages and disadvantages of indirect taxes, through the agency of which the Federal Government collects the largest proportion of its revenues, have been already pointed out, the field of discussion under this head is practically limited to the existing methods of State or local taxation on property and business, in contradistinction to national or Federal taxation, or to the system under which nearly six tenths of all the contributions which the people of the United States make for the support of their governments are assessed and collected.

In Great Britain about two thirds of the revenue of the kingdom is from "local" in contradistinction to "national" taxation—£53,000,000 in 1890. Of this amount some £32,000,000, or about three fifths, is raised by rates on the annual value of land and house property in various localities. The next largest source of local revenue is from tolls, dues, etc., from docks, piers, harbors, ferries, and markets, and yields over £7,000,000, or thirteen per cent of the total. The total expenditures for local purposes in 1890 were returned at £67,000,000; the difference between local expenditures and receipts being made up by contributions or grants from the inland revenue department of the kingdom and by municipal loans. The aggregate local debt of the kingdom is