If You Put A White Cap On A Man's
Head And Place Him In A Kitchen, He Will Soon Learn To Be A Cook.
But He Will Never Be Made A Cook By Standing In The Dining-Room And
Seeing The Dishes As They Are Brought Up.
The Chancellor of the
Exchequer is our cook; and the House of Commons, not the Treasury
chambers, is his kitchen.
Let the Secretary of the United States
Treasury sit in the House of Representatives! He would learn more
there by contest with opposing members than he can do by any amount
of study in his own chamber.
But the House of Representatives itself has not as yet learned its
own lesson with reference to taxation. When I say that the United
States are in want of a financier, I do not mean that the deficiency
rests entirely with Mr. Chase. This necessity for taxation, and for
taxation at so tremendous a rate, has come suddenly, and has found
the representatives of the people unprepared for such work. To us,
as I conceive, the science of taxation, in which we certainly ought
to be great, has come gradually. We have learned by slow lessons
what taxes will be productive, under what circumstances they will be
most productive, and at what point they will be made unproductive by
their own weight. We have learned what taxes may be levied so as to
afford funds themselves, without injuring the proceeds of other
taxes, and we know what taxes should be eschewed as being specially
oppressive to the general industry and injurious to the well-being
of the nation. This has come of much practice, and even we, with
all our experience, have even got something to learn. But the
public men in the States who are now devoting themselves to this
matter of taxing the people have, as yet, no such experience. That
they have inclination enough for the work is, I think, sufficiently
demonstrated by the national tax bill, the wording of which is now
before me, and which will have been passed into law before this
volume can be published. It contains a list of every taxable
article on the earth or under the earth. A more sweeping catalogue
of taxation was probably never put forth. The Americans, it has
been said by some of us, have shown no disposition to tax themselves
for this war; but before the war has as yet been well twelve months
in operation, a bill has come out with a list of taxation so
oppressive that it must, as regards many of its items, act against
itself and cut its own throat. It will produce terrible fraud in
its evasion, and create an army of excise officers who will be as
locusts over the face of the country. Taxes are to be laid on
articles which I should have said that universal consent had
declared to be unfit for taxation. Salt, soap, candles, oil, and
other burning fluids, gas, pins, paper, ink, and leather, are to be
taxed.
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