Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/340

324 taxes of Great Britain being practically levied on only four articles—spirits, tea, coffee, and tobacco; and the inland revenue also on practically four—spirits, beer, legacies and successions, and stamps (on deeds, insurance policies, bills of exchange, receipts, drafts, etc.). Generalizing, then, on the basis of so broad a fact, how illogical and unscientific was the assumption that whatever persons, property, or business are not taxed directly are exempt from taxation!—and yet the practical exemplification of such a system, in the case of England, was a most efficient instrumentality for grinding the masses of her people down to poverty.

On the other hand, to generalize from the experience of an individual or a class in place of that of a nation or community, let us take the case of a person who passes all the year in transitu—moving backward and forward, for example, in a boat on the line of the Erie Canal, or between the head waters of the Mississippi and its mouth; a citizen of no one State, a resident in no one town, and buying all that he eats, drinks, and wears wherever he can buy cheapest. Does this man escape taxation because he has no permanent situs (residence as a citizen), and is unknown by any assessor? If he does, then his occupation is more profitable to the extent of the taxes he avoids than is that of the individual who, following analogous occupations, resides permanently in one location, and pays taxes regularly; or else some notable, easily discernible cause, as undue competition to obtain situations, will account for his exemption.

Let us next consider how practical experience definitely indicates the line of least resistance, in conformity with which those contributions of property or service which the State requires its citizens to make for its support, and are worthy of designation as taxes, diffuse themselves. Let us take first that form of indirect taxation which is known as customs, or taxes on imports, one from which the Federal Government of the United States has derived in recent years more than half of its revenue, and Great Britain more than one fourth of its total receipts from all forms of imperial taxes. That all such taxes as a rule diffuse themselves, and ultimately fall upon and are paid by final consumers, is capable of demonstration by a great variety of evidence. Every remission of customs duties on the imports into any country of its staple articles of consumption is followed by a reduction of cost approximately equal to such reduction, and a consequent increase in consumption. On the other hand, nothing is better settled than that an increase in customs taxes on imported articles as a rule increases prices and tends to reduce consumption. When Great Britain, in 1863, reduced her taxes (duties) on her imports of tea from 1s. 5d. to 1s. per pound, her importation of tea increased from 114,000,000 pounds in 1862 to 139,000,000 in