582 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



poses, and $329,635,200 for municipalities and schools. If a tem- 

 l)orary and extraordinary charge for pensions — $140,959,361 in 

 1895 — which now rests upon the Federal Government, were elimi- 

 nated, and Federal expenditures were reduced correspondingly, 

 the taxation and expenditures of the national or Federal Govern- 

 ment would be small in comparison with the total cost of all gov- 

 ernment. Federal and State ; a result that constitutes a complete 

 refutation of the common assumption that the national Govern- 

 ment is rapidly absorbing the functions of the State and local gov- 

 ernments and reducing them substantially to police precincts. Of 

 the Federal revenues, nearly one half under the existing fiscal sys- 

 tem are derived from taxes on distilled spirits, fermented liquors, 

 and tobacco, all of which may be fairly regarded as self-imposed. 

 If we assume, as we are probably warranted in doing, the aver- 

 age value of the product of each person in the country loJio is 

 occupied for gain, at six hundred dollars per year,* or two dollars 

 per day for three hundred working days, then that part of the 

 annual product of the country which went to the support of its 

 Government or the State in 1890 was the equivalent of the work 

 of 1,734,121 such persons for one year, or 520,236,300 days' work ; 

 or, in other words, for every dollar that the Government expends, 

 somebody must work for at least half a day, or furnish a value 

 equivalent for such an amount of work. Again, for the year 1890, 

 the aggregate of taxation in the United States — national, State, 

 and local — required or represented about seven per cent of the 

 value of the entire annual product of the country, which proba- 

 bly approximated $1,200,000,000. In former days it was often cus- 

 tomary to allow persons to pay their taxes by actual days' work, 

 and this is still the practice in some parts of the United States 

 and in Canada and some countries of Europe. Before the French 

 Revolution, the tax imposed on the French peasantry, and known 

 under the name of corvee, as has been already shown, was an ob- 

 ligation to render a specified number of days' work to the state, 

 or to some seignior or noble. During the early colonial days of 

 Massachusetts, the people of the settlements far removed from 

 Massachusetts Bay paid their proportion of the expense of main- 

 taining a colonial government at Boston in wheat, which was 

 shipped down the Connecticut River in canoes, and then trans- 

 ferred to sailing craft and transported by sea to Boston. One could 

 hardly imagine the disturbance and excitement that would be oc- 

 casioned if all the taxes of the country were to be collected in this 



* The most recent investigations of Mr. Atkinson, the best authority on this subject, 

 have led him to the conclusion that the average value of the product of each person in the 

 United States, working for gain three hundred days in the year, was in 1890 nearer $700 

 than $600 per annum. 



