PRINCIPLES OF TAXATION. 323 



creased, either by a lawful or unlawful expenditure of public money, 

 they can not in any possible way avoid paying some portion of its 

 increase; or, in other words, that increased taxes meant increased 

 cost of living, through increased rents, increased price of fuel, cloth- 

 ing, and provisions, and possibly diminished opportunity to labor 

 through such increased cost of the products of labor as would limit 

 and restrict markets or consumption. In short, that taxes inevi- 

 tably fall upon them through the increased price of all they con- 

 sume, even if they pay nothing to the tax collector directly. A large 

 proportion of the masses of the city of New York in 1871— '72, who 

 paid no taxes directly, accordingly and spontaneously joined hands 

 with the comparatively few of their fellow-citizens who did pay in 

 resisting extravagance and corruption.* 



We are thus led up and forced to the recognition of two proposi- 

 tions, or rather principles, in respect to taxation that can not be 

 invalidated. The first is, that it is not necessary that a tax assessor 

 or collector should personally assess and levy upon every citizen of a 

 State or community in order that all should be compelled to con- 

 tribute of his property for the support of such State or community; 

 second, that there is an inexorable law by which every man must 

 bear a portion of the burden of public expendiures, even though the 

 official assessors take no direct cognizance of him whatever. 



The following incident may here be cited as instructive: In one 

 of the recent official hearings before a legislative committee of one 

 of the States, a strenuous advocate of the popular doctrine that there 

 was and could be no such thing as equality in taxation except by 

 rigidly taxing everybody directly for all his property, of every 

 description, both real and personal, and that to not tax immediately 

 and directly was, in at least a great degree, to exempt from taxation, 

 expressed himself as entirely opposed to any system of restricting 

 assessments to a comparatively few things, on the ground that it 

 would be a recognition in the United States of a system which in 

 Great Britain had ground down the masses into poverty. He, how- 

 ever, obtained some new light on the subject of nondiffusion by 

 being reminded that if the masses of England had been grievously 

 oppressed by taxation, it had been under a system of many years' 

 standing, which never in any way brings the tax collector in direct 

 contact with nineteen twentieths of the entire population; the cus- 



* The assertion would not be warranted that the masses of New York were wholly unani- 

 mous in condemning Tweed, for a portion of them were undoubtedly well content with the 

 situation. He had curried favor with the very poor and ignorant by distributing coal and 

 flour, and making ostentatious presents of money ; and these " charities " are remembered 

 to this day in the poorer parts of New York city, and Tweed is esteemed by many as the 

 victim of injustice, and a man who suffered because he was the friend of the people. 



