be its maximum. The British income tax under Mr.
Gladstone in 1885 was three and a third per cent. But
this is mere child's play, being about equivalent to a
property tax of one seventh of one per cent. When
seriously considered, the question will be between
five, ten, twenty, and thirty per cent.

We must act upon the undisguised truth that individual humanity is not
yet properly educated, and not yet qualified to exercise its
trusteeship of wealth, for the hard struggles against the oppressive
power of poverty, sickness, robbery, fraud, and sudden calamity have
made the self-protective faculties predominant, and the sharp rivalry
and competition of business has so increased their predominance that
the thought of public welfare is never paramount, and is but an
occasional glimmer, and the death-bed surrender of wealth, if it
considers the welfare of society at all, considers it so blindly that
a large proportion of the benevolent endowments are of little real
value.

It is, therefore, necessary that the outcry of suffering and the
warning of danger should rouse the public conscience to nobler
principles, and that society in its maximum wisdom, which embraces a
few earnest philanthropists, many capable financiers and economists,
very many tender-hearted women who will not consent to suffering, and
who are destined to participate in government, as well as a great many
who are personally conscious of wrongs that need rectifying, should
assume the administration of the SUPERFLUOUS WEALTH abnormally
accumulated.

The change proposed is so great that its realization may be far off,
and the evolution of law may be rivalled by the evolution of evasive
ingenuity, so that the commonwealth may be compelled to prohibit
evasive ante-mortem donations, and to reinforce the succession tax by
more stringent measures, from which there can be no escape, and which
will control plutocracy as effectively as any succession tax, and thus
render the latter of less importance; but it is none the less
important that the principle should be asserted, that the dead shall
not rule the living.

There are two obvious measures, and _one of them is sure to be adopted
soon_, without waiting for the abolition of unlimited inheritance. The
income tax is made almost necessary by the last Congress, which
emptied the treasury, and the income tax, if made accumulative,
increasing its rates with the