t fifty million
dollars per annum. Either of these sums is probably much larger than it
would be advisable to attempt to produce by a direct tax in this
country. Stamps, in 1815, yielded an income of thirty million dollars.
During the past year this simple and productive source of revenue
produced in Great Britain forty-five million dollars. It seems probable
that this species of tax might be extended in this country much farther
than it now is, without oppression to the people, and with a handsome
increase of the revenue.

But the excise has ever been the most productive fountain of revenue in
Great Britain. The income from this tax in that country, during the year
ending September, 1863, was eighty-four million dollars. In the year
1815, when, on account of the smaller population, the other sources of
revenue were less productive than at the present day, the excise yielded
an income of not less than a hundred and thirty-five million dollars. It
is worthy of notice that, of this income, the tax upon the various forms
of spirituous liquors supplied a large element. English spirits, which,
in the experiment of 1736, it had been found could not carry a tax of
five dollars per gallon, it was now found easily bore the more moderate
but still large tax of ten shillings sixpence sterling. Aside from this
tax was the duty on beer, cider, and malt, the last of which alone
yielded an income of thirteen million dollars annually.

* * * * *

We have lingered on these details, which to many will be dry and
uninteresting, because they supply a kind of guide to the changes which
must ultimately take place in the tax laws of this country, and because,
further, they furnish an answer to all those objections which
periodically disturb the minds of the timid and doubtfully patriotic in
our midst. But these lessons we must leave the reader to extract for
himself. We close simply with saying that, while excessive and
undiscriminating taxation is always a curse, yet taxation, properly
imposed, although severe and long continued, may be far from
disadvantageous. We have seen the English people slowly arising, through
two centuries, from a nation comparatively free from taxation and
without a national debt, to one bearing an annual tax of three hundred
and fifty million dollars, and holding absorbed in its midst a national
debt of nearly four thousand million dollars. We have seen it during
this period consta