142 AMERICAN FARMS. 



increase of over 400 per cent, in one department of 

 taxation.' 



' In Canada, federal taxation has grown in volume 

 125 per cent, during the last twenty years, while the 

 population has not increased 50 per cent. 



Mr. Edward Atkinson estimates the total taxation of 

 the Union for 1880, viz., federal, State, and municipal, at 

 $14 per capita, or $70 for the family of five, and the 

 savings of the people at $18 per capita. In Canada, the 

 proportions are probably about the same. These figures, 

 which we presume are near correct, show the somewhat 

 alarming proportion taxation bears to actual savings, 

 and how absolutely necessary it is that such a tax be put 

 upon the right shoulders. According to Mr. Atkinson, 

 the yearly net savings of the people would be nearly its 

 present amount, but for these taxes. The incidence of 

 taxation, in city as well as country municipality, and 

 between the classes universally, becomes a serious one. 

 Are not the majority of our agriculturists groaning 

 beneath their unequal burdens ? 



There is hardly a doubt that such impositions did 

 much to assist in bringing about the ruin of the ancient 

 civilizations. And we are not without evidences to 

 show that the peasant classes in those times were the 

 bearers of the principal part of a load which was seldom 

 any thing but crushing. Geikie, in his ** Life of Christ," 

 speaks of the exhaustion of Palestine through the op- 

 pression of the Romans " falling with special weight on 

 an agricultural people like the Jews " ; Gibbon, in his 



' The late civil war should not be held accountable for the weight 

 of taxes twenty-three years after its close. From 1789 to 1830, with 

 the burden of the expenses of two wars resting upon the United 

 States, the tax per capita was less than $1.75 annually. But, whatof 

 Canada's federal tax in the year 1889, of $5.66 per capita, without 

 any disastrous war on which to throw the odium ? 



