flannels, broadcloths and pilot-cloths, cassimeres and doeskins, woollen dress-goods, silk manufactures, gunny-bags, and cloth, the rate ranges from sixty to one hundred and forty per cent, it being but sixty on silks. Importers and producers pay the duties in advance, and therefore sixty per cent more of capital is required in trade, in production, and in distribution through the wholesale and retail dealers.

"Without imposts or excises, the cost of products to the consumer would be as follows:

First cost to importer or producer.

Ten per cent to importer or producer
Ten per cent to wholesaler

Twenty per cent to retailer

Total under free trade .

With duties at an average of sixty per cent, the cost is:

00

10

11

24

$1 45

66

Extra cost on account of duty

1 45

87

• Thus, under our system of taxation, it costs the people of the country $127,000,000 to get $100,000,000 into the treasury. This shows the great wastefulness of the system. By increasing the amount of capital required in trade and the industries fully sixty per cent, it throws business into fewer hands, thereby diminishing competition and increasing the cost of products to the people. Hence, in this regard it is a swindle of sections with less property, and still more of persons of little or no property.

"As it costs the West seventy-seven per cent more in supporting the government than it costs the East, in proportion to wealth, seventyseven per cent must be added to the cost of the profits to importers, producers, and dealers, on products consumed in the West. This gives $147,790,000 as the cost to the West on $100,000,000 of revenue. To this add the $77,000,000 extra cost of $100,000,000 of revenue, on the score of seventy-seven per cent less property, and we have displayed the. inequality of the system in the proportion of $229,790,000 to $127,000,000 as between the West and the East."

In conclusion, let me ask: How did the notion of obtaining revenue by means of a tariff first arise? It is simply a relic of barbarism, and traces its origin to the worst period of the feudal age, when each petty owner of a castle on a crag adjoining a highway stopped the luckless commercial travellers that were compelled to pass through his domain, and forced them to pay what he dignifiedly called a tribute, for the privilege of passing on without broken bones, mutilated noses and ears, and other like amenities. Ought the American nation to perpetuate such a system of public robbery, especially when that nation itself never would have been brought into existence but for the purpose of abrogating that system? And the internalrevenue system, with its taxation on beer, highwines, tobacco, paper, etc., is but another form of the same system of public robbery.

As matters stand under the present tariff, each reader of a newspaper, or of a book, as well as each writer, from the most gifted author down to the scribbling school-boy, is robbed of an extra charge on the paper he uses, for the benefit of a very few paper-manufacturing monopolists; and the consumer of any kind of iron-ware, from an iron spoon up to a ponderous locomotive, is in the same way tariff-taxed for the benefit of a few iron-manufacturers.

A system so iniquitous in all its features, assuredly should be abrogated without further argument or discussion.

CHAPTER V.

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

With all the objections to our present mode of taxation and to our revenue system, outlined in the foregoing chapters, it is certainly surprising, that no steps have as yet been taken to establish an absolute system of taxation, operating equally upon all citizens, such as I have suggested in the substitution of an income-tax, judiciously graduated, to take the place of the countless oppressive modes of taxation now resorted to.

I am well aware that no system is more unpopular as yet, and that an income-tax is here, as well as in England, the bete noir of taxpayers. They will uncomplainingly pay enormous rates of taxation

when levied upon them through means of a tariff and internal-revenue taxes on spirits, beer, wines, tobacco, and all the other articles on the prescribed list; nay, there is even comparatively little grumbling when taxes are levied on their real property. But direct taxation on their annual income is held in holy horror, even by the agricultural classes, who suffer most under the present system. It is impossible to make the farmers understand that they are specially interested in having such a graduated income-tax established, and that they are the chief sufferers now, when they must pay full taxes on their real property, while the owners of personal property and the professional recipients of lucrative incomes in cities pay only a small part of the amount they ought justly to pay, and rich and powerful corporations and monopolies pay still less in proportion, or contrive to escape taxation altogether, even like the bondholders.

But in order to make my proposed system of an income-tax perfectly effective, its establishment must be accompanied by measures which will render it impossible that taxation should ever become so oppressive as to lead to repudiation of taxes altogether. Make a tax oppressive, and it will bring in next to nothing. A heavy tariff is as good as no tariff at all, so far as the revenue is concerned, since it almost necessitates smuggling,- a source of general demoralization,— and thus the employment of a number of detectives, whose salaries swallow up whatever duties are collected on the goods not smuggled in. An oppressive tax on the valuation of real or personal property inevitably leads to lying and false swearing. Unjust and extravagant taxation, finally, which arises from the incurrence of exorbitant public debts by cities, counties, or States, leads to general repudiation. These are facts which it is impossible to dispute, and which no legislation, however skilfully applied, can remove. The only remedy is to extirpate that general aversion to the payment of incometaxes which thus drives otherwise honest men to perjury and repudiation, by removing its causes: the injustice of the present mode of taxation, and the oppressiveness of the taxes themselves. The former object we can accomplish by substituting general income-taxes for the numberless modes of taxation now in force; the latter object necessitates legal measures, that may at the moment seem altogether incompatible with our American notions of the powers inherent in every municipal government, but which, I believe, will prove indispensable in the removal of one of the most serious evils under which

we suffer. Every State constitutional convention hereafter assembling should prohibit the State itself, and every county and city within its limits, from contracting any further bonded debts. If money is needed for public improvements, let the amount required be raised at once by taxation. It is absurd to argue that the taxpaying people would object to such a procedure, on the plea that the future generations ought to bear a part of the expense incurred by the present age for permanent public improvements; for this proposition involves as great a mathematical fallacy as ever was proposed. For it is very evident that a generation of thirty years must pay a public debt thus incurred, not only once, but twice or threefold, as interest, and then turn it over unpaid to the coming generations. This is especially the case where the rate of interest is so high as it is in the United States.

With the exception of a few favorite municipalities, a city or county which issues bonds for some scheme of public improvements generally put forward in the interest of contractors has to pay from eight to ten per cent interest (counting in commissions). Now, the interest on such a bond will equal in from seven to ten years, and more than equal if compounded, that is, if new bonds have to be issued for the payment of the interest, as is usually the case, the entire sum of the principal loan. Hence a thirty years' generation will have paid in that time more than three times the amount of the debt in interest, and still leave the debt unpaid.

In short, the only honest, and at the same time most economical system for the administration of public finances is the same as that for the management of private finances, always to live within our income, and never to borrow money for the improvement of our property. Put aside the interest, and in a few years there will be money enough in the treasury to pay for the improvements.

But there is still another feature connected with the tariff system which deserves special attention at the present time.

By keeping up our present protective tariff we unite all Europe against our exports, as a sort of retaliatory measure. The German Empire, which suffers the most from our tariff system, naturally leads the van; and, as I have said before, it is no longer a diplomatic secret, that Bismarck is agitating a united European blockade against American commerce, just as Napoleon blockaded that of Great Britain in 1807.

INTERCOMMUNICATION BY THE PRESS.

CHAPTER I.

THE PRESS.

The original conception of a newspaper was, as its name indicates, that of a publication which should contain the authentic and latest news of public interest that could be ascertained and collected for circulation. Prior to the invention of types for printing, such papers were written and copied for distribution, necessarily to a very limited extent. But since the discovery of the art of printing and the application of steam as a motive power for the printing-press, the publication and circulation of newspapers has assumed vast proportions, as a general means for intercommunication between all citizens and peoples.

This most wonderful discovery of modern times for the general dissemination of intelligence throughout the world has thus multiplied the old methods of communicating ideas and news more than a million-fold, illumining the darkest districts of the world, and opening to the people a new era of universal intelligence, instruction, and So long as these newspapers were managed simply for the dissemination of truthful information, their influence was always in favor of the freedom of the human race; but the extraordinary extension of the circulation of printed newspapers initiated a great change in their nature and character. Formerly, men who, from their high culture and wisdom, felt authorized to give publicity to their individual opinions on public questions, did so in pamphlets, over their own signatures. The newspapers had not yet attempted to control public opinion for private personal aggrandizement or persecution, and the pamphlets exercised no further influence than the strength of their facts or arguments justified. Their readers were invited only to the exercise of self-thinking and individual judgment.