his time in repeating
the failure of the old Confederation, and should return at once to
New York. It was undoubtedly his influence which secured the wide
and absolute field of taxation to the General Government. He well
knew that direct taxes are onerous, and as the majority insisted
on levying them in proportion to population, as in the old
Confederation, their use as a resource to the General Government
was practically nullified. Such a system involved the absurdity
that men taken _per capita_ average the same in respect to wealth,
and that one hundred thousand people in New York should pay no more
tax than the same number in Arkansas. Statesmen and financiers
saw from the first that the direct tax clause in the Constitution
would be valuable only in forcing the use of the excise. But for
the dread of this, the States would not have yielded all the sources
of indirect taxation to the National Government.

When appointed Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Hamilton insisted
upon the prompt levy of excises. He induced the first Congress to
lay a tax on all distilled spirits. If made from molasses or sugar
or other foreign substance, the tax should be from eleven to thirty
cents per gallon according to the percentage above or below proof.
If made from domestic products, the tax should be from nine to
twenty-five cents per gallon. The first was practically a tax on
rum, the second on whiskey. This excise was followed in subsequent
years by duties on carriages, on snuff, on property sold at auction,
on refined sugar, and by the sale of stamps. Other articles were
in after years added to the list, and to aid the Treasury during
the period of the second war with Great Britain, a heavy imposition
of internal duties was resorted to as the most prompt and efficient
mode of replenishing the hard pressed Treasury.

THE INTERNAL-REVENUE SYSTEM.

The excise was from the first unpopular. The men who insisted that
"black quart-bottles" should be admitted free of duty when the
first tariff bill was passed, did not relish the levying of a heavy
tax on the whiskey that was to fill them. The exciseman was to
their view precisely what Dr. Johnson had defined him in his
dictionary: "an odious wretch, employed to collect an unjust tax."
Revolutionary proceedings had been inaugurated by resistance to a
tax on tea. But tea at that day was looked upon as a luxury in
which only a few