Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/66

58 a matter of course, the people with the larger incomes will buy all they need with the necessary consequence that the final burden falls on those least able to bear it.

All systems of taxation have adjusted themselves more or less logically to these conditions.

It has been found in practice among all civilized nations that any large amount of taxation must be derived from a few articles of very general use; as, for instance, our national taxes on liquors and tobacco have for twenty years preceding the Spanish war annually averaged two dollars and a half ($2.50) per head, that rate sufficing to meet the normal expenses of the government during the same period. That is to say, taxes on liquors and tobacco, domestic and foreign, have annually yielded a revenue in money sufficient for twenty years prior to the Spanish war for the support of the civil service, and the army and the navy before these forces were augmented beyond the requirement of national defense. The taxes necessary to meet pensions and interest have been derived from other sources. In other words, under normal conditions, had we paid the national debt, as we might have many years ago without feeling the burden in any considerable measure, and had our pensions been limited to true cases, the people of this country would only have been called upon to forego a part of their consumption of liquors and tobacco in order to support the national government. At the present time, under the augmented taxes on liquors and tobacco, the revenue from these sources is between three dollars and a half ($3.50) and four dollars ($4) per head.

Great Britain, France and Germany derive a large part of their revenues from the same sources, namely, from these and other articles which are consumed in largest measure by the millions rather than by the millionaires. These taxes are collected at the least cost for collection and they meet a true canon of taxation, taking from consumers a part of a product which consumers can spare without impairing their productive energy.

Again, we may find the almost necessary resort of the British Government in India to a salt tax, because it is only through the tax on salt that the masses of the people can be reached, the next great resource of East Indian revenue being what is practically a single tax on land, assessed directly without regard to the relative product year by year. These taxes on salt and land admittedly reduce a large part of the population of India to such condition of extreme poverty that when a bad year comes famine devastates the land. The hoards of wealth in India are enormous, but they cannot be reached. The problem of taxation in India is not a question of will but of power to collect.

The octroi tax imposed upon the traffic of the city with the country, now in force in France, Italy and some other countries, rendered