328 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



rate which the United States imposed in 1894 on all its dutiable im- 

 ports — namely, fifty per cent — Great Britain obviously had to pay 

 some $557,000,000 in that year for the support of foreign govern- 

 ments; and while this has been the experience of Great Britain 

 for more than forty years of this century, she has as a nation been 

 increasing in wealth during this whole period. 



Some of the recent official experiences of the Government of 

 the United States that are pertinent to the topic under considera- 

 tion are sufficiently curious to make them worthy of an economic 

 record. In a speech introducing a bill into the United States House 

 of Representatives, which subsequently resulted in the tariff act of 

 1890, the then chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means laid 

 down the following proposition : " The Government ought not to 

 buy abroad what it can buy at home. Nor should it be exempted 

 from the laws it imposes upon its citizens." 



This would seem to warrant the characterization of a discovery 

 that the United States had some reliable and important source of 

 revenue independent of taxation,* and that, by compelling the appli- 

 cation of a part of this income to the payment of taxes to itself, the 

 Government is placed upon an equality with the citizens. A 

 legitimate criticism on this proposition is that the idea that all 

 the income of the Treasury is derived from the people, and that to 

 transfer portions of this income from one official recipient to another 

 can have hardly any other result than an additional cost of book- 

 keeping, seems never to have entered the mind of the speaker. 



Again, the United States tariff act of 1883 contained in its free 

 list a provision for the admittance of " articles imported for the use 

 of the United States, provided that the price of the same did not in- 

 clude the duty " imposed on such importations. Under the tariff act 

 of 1890 this provision was stricken out of the statute, with the result 

 that when the Government imported any articles for its own use which 

 were subject to duties (as, for example, materials to be used in the 

 National Bureau of Printing and Engraving), it was obliged, in vir- 

 tue of its nonexemption from the laws which it imposed on its own 

 citizens, to pay such duties itself. But as the Government has no 

 authority to expend money for any purpose without the authority 

 of Congress, the latter body accordingly authorized the Federal 

 Treasury to apropriate money from its tax receipts and make pay- 

 ments with the same to the customhouse, which the customhouse 

 was to immediately pay back into the Treasury. Just what process 



* Of the net ordinary receipts of the Federal Government ($385,819,000) in 1893, only 

 about $12,000,000 was derived from sources that could not be regarded as taxes, and were 

 mainly receipts from the sales and surveys of public and Indian lands ($4,120,000) and of 

 other Government property. 



