We, At Any Rate, Knew How To Tax Ourselves - If Only The
Taxes Might Be Forthcoming.
We were already well used to the work;
and a minister with a willing House of Commons had all his material
ready to his hand.
It has not been so in the United States. The
difficulty has not been with the people who should pay the taxes,
but with the minister and the Congress which did not know how to
levy them. Certainly not as yet have those who are now criticising
the doings on the other side of the water a right to say that the
American people are unwilling to make personal sacrifices for the
carrying out of this war. No sign has as yet been shown of an
unwillingness on the part of the people to be taxed. But wherever a
sign could be given, it has been given on the other side. The
separate States have taxed themselves very heavily for the support
of the families of the absent soldiers. The extra allowances made
to maimed men, amounting generally to twenty-four shillings a month,
have been paid by the States themselves, and have been paid almost
with too much alacrity.
I am of opinion that the Americans will show no unwillingness to pay
the amount of taxation which must be exacted from them; and I also
think that as regards their actual means they will have the power to
pay it. But as regards their power of obtaining access to those
means, I must confess that I see many difficulties in their way. In
the first place they have no financier, no man who by natural
aptitude and by long-continued contact with great questions of
finance, has enabled himself to handle the money affairs of a nation
with a master's hand. In saying this I do not intend to impute any
blame to Mr. Chase, the present Secretary of the Treasury. Of his
ability to do the work properly had he received the proper training,
I am not able to judge. It is not that Mr. Chase is incapable. He
may be capable or incapable. But it is that he has not had the
education of a national financier, and that he has no one at his
elbow to help him who has had that advantage.
And here we are again brought to that general absence of statecraft
which has been the result of the American system of government. I
am not aware that our Chancellors of the Exchequer have in late
years always been great masters of finance; but they have at any
rate been among money men and money matters, and have had financiers
at their elbows if they have not deserved the name themselves. The
very fact that a Chancellor of the Exchequer sits in the house of
Commons and is forced in that House to answer all questions on the
subject of finance, renders it impossible that he should be ignorant
of the rudiments of the science.
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