little of food other than what is produced almost spontaneously, the problem of how to raise revenue by any form of taxation for defraying the necessary expenditures of the Government has been one of great embarrassment. For the year 1884 these expenditures averaged three dollars and forty cents per head of the entire population, and of this amount an average of about fifty cents per head could only be obtained from any internal taxation, and this mainly through the indirect agency of licenses and stamps, and not by any direct assessment. The balance of required revenue was obtained from a special tax on some set manufacture, and from export and import duties. A similar state of affairs in Mexico, heretofore noticed somewhat in detail (see vol. xlix, No. 1, pages 45, 46), would also seem to necessitate a resort to a system of indirect taxation.
It is interesting to note, in connection with this subject, that while the States and municipal governments of the Federal Union derive their revenues almost entirely from direct taxation, the national revenues flow almost wholly from indirect taxes on commodities or personal property.
Attention is here also particularly directed to a fact that has almost entirely escaped the notice of economic and fiscal authorities and writers, and that is the remarkable change that has taken place within the last fifty years in the British tax system, whereby, through an extensive substitution of direct for indirect taxation, the burden of tax incidence has been shifted to a great extent from the community at large to the propertied classes. Thus, in 1841–’42, indirect taxes yielded seventy-three per cent and direct taxes twenty-seven per cent of the total imperial revenue, but in 1895–’96 indirect taxes yielded fifty-two per cent and direct taxes forty-eight per cent. Is not the inference warranted, that in the change in the incidence of British taxation above noted is to be found at least a partial explanation of the remarkable and progressive increase, in comparatively recent years, in the consumption of the various commodities that enter into the living of the laboring classes of Great Britain, and is it not also singular that the above facts and their possible inference do not as yet seem to have attracted the attention of those most interested in social economics?
