poses, and $329,635,200 for municipalities and schools. If a temporary and extraordinary charge for pensions—$140,959,361 in 1895—which now rests upon the Federal Government, were eliminated, and Federal expenditures were reduced correspondingly, the taxation and expenditures of the national or Federal Government would be small in comparison with the total cost of all government. Federal and State; a result that constitutes a complete refutation of the common assumption that the national Government is rapidly absorbing the functions of the State and local governments and reducing them substantially to police precincts. Of the Federal revenues, nearly one half under the existing fiscal system are derived from taxes on distilled spirits, fermented liquors, and tobacco, all of which may be fairly regarded as self-imposed. If we assume, as we are probably warranted in doing, the average value of the product of each person in the country who is occupied for gain, at six hundred dollars per year,[1] or two dollars per day for three hundred working days, then that part of the annual product of the country which went to the support of its Government or the State in 1890 was the equivalent of the work of 1,734,121 such persons for one year, or 520,236,300 days' work; or, in other words, for every dollar that the Government expends, somebody must work for at least half a day, or furnish a value equivalent for such an amount of work. Again, for the year 1890, the aggregate of taxation in the United States—national, State, and local—required or represented about seven per cent of the value of the entire annual product of the country, which probably approximated $1,200,000,000. In former days it was often customary to allow persons to pay their taxes by actual days' work, and this is still the practice in some parts of the United States and in Canada and some countries of Europe. Before the French Revolution, the tax imposed on the French peasantry, and known under the name of corvée, as has been already shown, was an obligation to render a specified number of days' work to the state, or to some seignior or noble. During the early colonial days of Massachusetts, the people of the settlements far removed from Massachusetts Bay paid their proportion of the expense of maintaining a colonial government at Boston in wheat, which was shipped down the Connecticut River in canoes, and then transferred to sailing craft and transported by sea to Boston. One could hardly imagine the disturbance and excitement that would be occasioned if all the taxes of the country were to be collected in this
- ↑ The most recent investigations of Mr. Atkinson, the best authority on this subject, have led him to the conclusion that the average value of the product of each person in the United States, working for gain three hundred days in the year, was in 1890 nearer $700 than $600 per annum.
