Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/74

62 legislation regarding the national debt is clogging enterprise. Instead of relieving the people from oppressive taxes, the legislature is devising means to further cripple their energies.

Wise statesmanship, instead of attempting to pay off in one generation the great national debt, would reduce taxes to the minimum required to pay the interest, keep up a small, efficient army and navy, and maintain moderately our civil and diplomatic service. The money it is proposed to collect from the people to quench the debt, would, if used by them, wonderfully expand the resources of the country, producing measureless wealth in improved real estate, in manufactures, in commercial enterprises.

Let us consider for a moment the consequences of reducing the taxation to the smallest amount required for carrying on the Government. Suppose that we could reduce the taxes two hundred and fifty millions a year—which might easily be done by getting rid of the "whiskey ring" and the tobacco frauds. This amount saved would in twenty years add five billions of dollars to the wealth of the people; that is to say, a sum equal to twice the present national debt. What gigantic enterprises could be undertaken with $5,000,000,000 circulating during the time I have mentioned! On the other hand, it will startle many to be told that, during the next twenty years, according to our present policy, the people of the United States will pay from their earnings twelve billions of dollars toward the national debt, and even then this debt will not be liquidated.

Again, the proposition to let our successors pay part of the obligation which we have incurred, is based, not only on the natural resources of the country, but on the rapid increase of its population and its consequent increase of ability to pay on the one hand, and of the number who will divide the burden on the other. In sixty years, the population of this country will not be less than one hundred millions. This increase will reduce the debt to about twenty-five dollars a head, by dividing it among one hundred millions instead of thirty.

I think, however, that popular confidence in the stability and solvency of the Republic is inspired more by broad and just views of its sources of wealth than by speculations regarding immediate legislation. To the former subject, therefore, let us return. Let us look, first, at a prospective source of national wealth now opening to enterprise, of whose value it is difficult now to form a proper idea. The Pacific railroad which, a few years ago, was talked about as a thing to be accomplished in a hundred years, now approaches completion. In three years more trains will be thundering over the Plains on the way to San Francisco, and the Atlantic and Pacific States will be united by one more indissoluble bond. California will then become the entrepôt for the great East India trade, which will be diverted from its present course, and pass through New York (destined to become the great metropolis), whence it will be dispersed to all parts of Europe. Even now our steamships bring rich freights across the Pacific, and San Francisco increases in wealth more rapidly than ever.

Whatever nation has had control of the East India trade has led the commerce of the world. If that trade should be diverted from its present course and directed to New York, Wall street would become the chief monetary centre of the world. Great Britain would regard us then as some venerable mother would regard her erratic but energetic son, attempting apparent impossibilities by taking huge weights upon his shoulders and trying to walk with them; one may conceive her trepidation at seeing the stripling she tried to manage, walking off with the roof from over her head. In her struggles to secure and keep possession of