e financially wisest and most
experienced, recognize the unwisdom and economic ill effect under
existing conditions of going beyond that limit.

III

The same observations hold good in the case of our proposed inheritance
taxation (maximum proposed here forty per cent., as against twenty per
cent. maximum in England and much less in all other countries). And
again there are to be added to Federal taxation the rates of state
legacy and inheritance taxation.

Inheritance taxation, moreover, has that inevitable element of
unfairness that it leaves entirely untouched the wastrel who never laid
by a cent in his life, and penalizes him who practiced industry,
self-denial and thrift. And it cannot be too often said that the
encouragement of thrift and enterprise is of the utmost desirability
under the circumstances in which the world finds itself, because it is
only by the intensified creation of wealth through savings and
production that the world can be re-established on an even keel after
the ravages and the waste of the war.

Furthermore, business men, of necessity, have only a limited amount of
their capital in liquid or quickly realizable form, and through the
absorption by the inheritance tax of a large proportion of such assets,
many a business may find itself with insufficient current capital to
continue operations after the death of a partner. This effect is not
only unfair in itself, but is made doubly so, as being a discrimination
in favor of corporations as against private business men and business
houses, inasmuch as corporations are, of course, not amenable to
inheritance taxation.

Whilst in the case of the rich we discourage saving by the very hugeness
of our taxation, or make it impossible, we fail to use the instrument
of taxation to promote saving in the case of those with moderate
incomes. And the enormous preponderance of saving which could and should
be effected does not lie within the possibilities of the relatively
small number of people with large means, but of the huge number of
people with moderate incomes.

Moreover, while the rich, in consequence of taxation, limitation of
profits, etc., have become less able to spend freely since our entrance
into the war, workingmen and farmers, through increased wages, steadier
employment and higher prices of crops, respectively, have become able to
spend more freely.

Workingmen are in receipt of wages never approached in pre-war times,
many