taxation is to our body politic what blood is to the body physical: if healthy, infusing life and warmth; but if unhealthy, the agent for producing discontent, decrepitude, and paralysis.
The absence or existence of limitations on the power of a government to make compulsory levies on the property or persons of its people for its use or support, constitutes the dividing line between a despotism and a free government—a fact most pertinent to legal, economic, and societary studies which has attracted little attention.
The methods and scope of what is called taxation regulate more than all other agencies the distribution of wealth, which is really the great question of the future to all nations. Ever since Adam Smith wrote his paramount work on the Wealth of Nations the political economists and students of social science have concerned themselves mainly with the production of wealth. That problem has been practically solved. Wealth is now produced with a rapidity that the world had never before supposed possible,[1] and the laws governing its production have become well understood by those who have made a special study of the subject. An inevitable result of this condition of affairs has been, that wealth produced under the greater control that man in general has obtained over the forces of Nature has aggregated itself, as it always will, in the hands of those whose faculties especially qualify them to obtain and manage it, and who, in common parlance, have received the name of "money-getters." These have become enormously rich, while the masses, whose material condition is also absolutely much better than at any former period of the world's history, are, however, relatively poorer. Improved facilities for transportation have greatly facilitated intercommunication,[2] and the opportunity thus afforded for the observation of extreme contrasts in individual conditions has operated as a very great factor in occasioning discontent among the masses, who by reason of the
- ↑ Recent investigations indicate that the absolute effective force available to the American people for the production of wealth is more than three times greater at the present time than it was in 1860. The outflow of British capital for investment in foreign securities and negotiated in London alone, during the eight years next previous to 1890, has been estimated by those best qualified to express an opinion, to have amounted to the large sum of nearly or quite $700,000,000 per annum. And this estimate does not comprise all the British capital loaned to foreign countries, but only such as was subject to public cognizance.
- ↑ The number of people annually transported on the railroads alone in the United States exceeds many times the total population of the country, the annual number for the New England States being more than sixteen times greater than their population. The widening of the sphere of one's surroundings, and a larger acquaintance with other men and pursuits, have long been recognized as not productive of content. Writing to his nephew more than one hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson thus concisely expressed the results of his own observation: "Traveling," he says, "makes men wiser, but less happy. When men of sober age
