A STATE OFFICIAL ON EXCESSIVE TAXATION. 647 



however, does not appear to take any such pleasant view of the 

 future. He has none of the blood of Don Quixote flowing in his 

 veins. The bestowal of the blessings of a Christian civilization 

 with machine guns upon breech-clouted savages has no attractions 

 for him. He sees that we have made such a disgraceful failure 

 of the management of the contemptible things in which we have 

 been so ignobly absorbed that we are threatened with national 

 decadence! "While the contests against unjust and oppressive 

 taxation," he says in his report for 1899, " have been the contests 

 of freedom and civil and religious liberty in the world, it must not 

 be forgotten that unjust and burdensome taxation has been in all 

 ages the most prolific cause of national decadence as well. There 

 are nations in Europe, once great and prosperous," he adds, thus 

 recalling the warnings of Lord Salisbury's famous speech on the 

 same subject, " which to-day seem dying of dry rot because, to meet 

 their immense expenses and to pay interest on their great bonded 

 debts, taxation has been increased beyond the safe limit, and the 

 very sources of national prosperity have been taxed so that they 

 run dry, or send down a rill where it should be a river. Few 

 national diseases are more dangerous or harder to cure than bur- 

 densome taxation. Caji any one charged with the responsibility 

 of making tax laws," he asks, profoundly stirred by the startling 

 facts that have come under his observation, " afford to ignore the 

 undoubted lessons of history or the manifest tendency of the times 

 in the matter of revenue raising and expending? " 



Obvious as is the fitting answer to this question, it is one that 

 few people stop to give. Both the lessons of history and the tend- 

 ency of the times are willfully and incessantly ignored. Not only 

 are they ignored by demagogues, who thrive most when public dis- 

 tress is greatest, and by misguided philanthropists, who seek to 

 relieve it in ways that only intensify it. Even publicists, whose 

 studies in history ought to make them more familiar with the signs 

 of social decadence than a man of affairs with vision less extended, 

 ignore them also.' They seem to be as insensible to the real sig- 

 nificance of what is going on before their eyes as the wooden totems 

 of a burning tepee. But to minds more alert and penetrating, even 

 if less congested wdth musty lore and fine intentions, the flight of 

 the farming population to the cities is something besides " a great 

 natural movement toward urban life that accompanies an advance 

 in civilization " — it is a desperate but futile attempt to escape 

 conditions that have become too hard to be borne. The swarms 

 of impoverished and degraded humanity that crowd the slums to 

 suffocation are not altogether the product of willful sloth and inca- 

 pacity; they are due, in a measure, to the growing taxation that has 



