442 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tience, and even of voluntary co-operation on the part of tax- 

 payers, and which find favor among the former races, hardly ex- 

 ist among the latter. It is interesting also to note, in connection 

 with this subject, that the restitution to the government of what 

 is termed "conscience money," which is of constant occurrence 

 in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, is said to be 

 very inconsiderable or wholly lacking in the States of the Latin 

 races. 



The comparatively insignificant position which the subject of 

 taxation holds in economic literature has already been pointed 

 out. Its relation to general literature is similar, and perhaps even 

 more remarkable. Since sin came into the world, there has prob- 

 ably been no one purely human agency more prolific of crime 

 and human suffering and of temptation to do wrong than the 

 multitude of arbitrary, impolitic, and absurd laws which have 

 been enacted to unjustly exact from the people contributions of 

 their labor and property under the name of taxation, and yet 

 the utilization of these experiences by novelists and dramatic 

 authors has been almost entirely restricted to the comparatively 

 petty transactions of smugglers and the illicit producers of dis- 

 tilled spirits. Even the terrible tax incidents which preceded and 

 in fact occasioned the great French Revolution, have not entered 

 largely as an element into more than one or two works of fiction 

 of acknowledged merit in the English language.* As a field of 

 morals also, this subject has been almost entirely ignored, and 

 rarely entered upon by theologians ; and yet under the tax laws of 

 the United States, to say nothing of other countries, the practice 

 of perjury is encouraged and tolerated to a degree that is utterly 

 inconsistent with the existence of any high standard of public 

 morality, or any rational religious belief, f And so also in the de- 

 partment of history. How few of those who consider themselves 

 well read and well informed, recognize that the terrible decadence 



* The only work of fiction of this character known to the writer is Gabrielle Andre, 

 by S. Baring-Gould (D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1871), in which the conditions of taxa- 

 tion existing in France, prior to the Revolution of l788-'89 are instructively used as the 

 basis of a historical story. 



f On this topic a leading American clergyman writes as follows : "It is probably a good 

 thing that clergymen have not preached numerous sermons on taxation, even on its moral 

 and religious aspects. That they have hitherto been ignorant on the subject is not so much 

 their fault as their misfortune, and being ignorant on the details of this matter they have 

 not taken it as the theme of set discourses. But, judging by my own experience, they 

 have preached on the application of moral principles to every department of life, and on the 

 obligation of a man to be honest in his dealings with government no less than with indi- 

 viduals. That taxation has moral relations and qualities they have perceived and stated, 

 and that probably was as far as their qualifications authorized them to proceed. Whether 

 the present encyclopedic education will give us the more serviceable clergymen remains to 

 be seen." 



