PRINCIPLES OF TAXATION. 491 



away from any store or shop an article, we buy and carry away with 

 it the accompanying and inherential taxes. 



Any primary taxpayer, who does not ultimately consume the 

 thing taxed, and who does not include the tax in the price of the 

 taxed property or its products, must literally throw away his money 

 and must soon become bankrupt and disappear as a competitor; and 

 accordingly the tax advancer will add the tax in his prices if he un- 

 derstands simple addition. How rapidly bankruptcy would befall 

 dealers in imported goods, wares, and merchandise in the United 

 States who did not strictly observe this rule will be realized when one 

 remembers that the average tax imposed by its Government (in 

 1896) on all dutiable imports is in excess of fifty per cent. 



When Dr. Franklin was asked by a committee of the English 

 House of Commons, prior to the American Revolution, if the province 

 of Pennsylvania did not practically relieve farmers and other land- 

 owners from taxation, and at the same time impose a heavy tax on 

 merchants, to the injury of British trade, he answered that " if such 

 special tax was imposed, the merchants were experts with their pens, 

 and added the tax to the price of their goods, and thus made the 

 farmers and all landowners pay their part of the tax as consumers." 



Taxes uniformly levied on all the subjects of taxation, and which 

 are not so excessive as to become a prohibition on the use of the thing- 

 taxed, become, therefore, a part of the cost of all production, distribu- 

 tion, and consumption, and diffuse and equate themselves by natural 

 laws in the same manner and in the same minute degree as all other 

 elements that constitute the expenses of production. We produce 

 to consume and consume to produce, and the cost of consumption, in- 

 cluding taxes, enters into the cost of production, and the cost of 

 production, including taxes, enters into the cost of consumption, and 

 thus taxes levied uniformly on things of the same class, by the laws of 

 competition, supply, and demand, and the all-pervading mediums of 

 labor, will be distributed, percussed, and repercussed to a remote de- 

 gree, until they finally fall upon every person, not in proportion to 

 his consumption of a given article, but in the proportion his con- 

 sumption bears to the aggregate consumption of the taxed com- 

 munity. 



A great capitalist, like Mr. Astor, bears no greater burden of taxa- 

 tion (and can not be made to bear more by any laws that can be 

 properly termed tax laws) than the proportion which his aggre- 

 gate individual consumption bears to the aggregate individual 

 consumption of all others in his circuit of immediate competi- 

 tion; and as to his other taxes, he is a mere tax collector, or con- 

 duit, conducting taxes from his tenants or borrowers to the State or 

 city treasury. A whisky distiller is a tax conduit, or tax collector, 



