indeed be denied. It is the fact, and is intended to be so, and he himself is perfectly aware of it; but it makes hardly any impression on his practical feelings and associations, serving to illustrate the distinction between what is merely known to be true and what is felt to be so."
Mr. Mill also expressed the opinion that men's minds are so little guided by reason on this subject that if it was attempted to raise all the imperial revenue of Great Britain by direct taxation, the dissatisfaction on the part of the people at having to pay so much would be extreme.
Speaking on this subject in the House of Lords in 1860, the Earl of Derby said that "by making the whole revenue of the United Kingdom depend upon direct taxation the pressure would be so odious that wars would be avoided, because no party would incur the odium of carrying them on."
There can be no doubt that high direct taxes, making evident to the most unobservant citizen the excess of burden imposed upon him, have been the prime cause of the repudiation of public debts in the United States, and the arrest or ruination of internal improvements of great importance.
Mr. George Opdyke, in his Treatise of Political Economy, advanced the idea that the phenomenon of preference for indirect taxation in the United States might be accounted for in part by the fact, that the unjust manner in which taxes were levied by Great Britain on her American colonies engendered in the public mind of their people "a deep-seated hatred of every form of taxation; and the direct being its most visible or sensible form, it has been mistaken for the worst—an impression that was strengthened when the most unpopular of our Presidents (the elder Adams) recommended this policy, and when the opposing political party, seizing the occasion to profit by public prejudice, represented it as the worst form of tyranny."[1]
An economic phenomenon in connection with this subject goes far to support the idea that political economy can not be an exact science, inasmuch as it is largely or wholly based on human action, concerning which nothing certain and invariable can be
- ↑ An acute economic student and observer writes as follows on this subject: "I have been very much struck by the apathy of taxpayers to the increase of taxes in their most direct form. Take Philadelphia, for example. Nearly every man owns a house there, and yet there seems to have been no objection to the grossest municipal extravagance, entailing heavier and heavier burdens every year. The city to-day levies about ten times as much per head as it did thirty or forty years ago. The exact figures would be easy to get, and would certainly point a moral adverse to your view that direct taxation is twin brother to public economy. I am inclined to look for an explanation to the fact that real estate values have steadily risen, so that after all the increase of taxation has been easily met."
