STUDY OF ECONOMICS. 27 



FOURTEENTH MEETING. 



Fourteenth Meeting, i8th February, 1888, T. B. Browning, 

 i\I.A., in the chair. 



Donations and exchanges since last meeting, 34. 



A vote of thanks was passed to Dr. John Hall, Senior, for 

 a donation of a shark's jaw, and a bottle of poisonous serpents 

 and centipedes from the West Indies and South America. 



Rev. C. J. S. Bethune, D C.L., and Rev. R. T. Nichol, were 

 elected members. 



Mr. Alan Macdougall read a paper on "The Water Temper- 

 atures of Lake Ontario," from observations made by him on 

 3rd September last, after a spell of very hot, dry weather. 



W. A, Douglass, B.A., then read a paper on the " Study of 

 Economics." 



He commenced by asking, is the study of Economics of sufficient 

 impoi'tance to demand a place in our educational institutions ? We 

 now have popular sovereignty, and on the intelligence of the people 

 must depend the goodness of our government. He then called atten- 

 tion to many of the questions of an economic character that must be 

 submitted to the people, and to aid the citizen in the proper solution 

 of these questions our educational system does almost nothing. To 

 show how disastrous such ignorance must be to a nation, he cited the 

 experience of the United States at the time of the late war. Men 

 could be had in abundance, but how to raise money in the best way 

 was a pressing problem. The tax imposed on distilled spirits was 

 taken as a sample of their method of taxation, and it was shown that 

 it had the following defects : — 1st, It increased the price and pi'ecluded 

 its use in several industries into which it largely entered, thus destroy- 

 ing or sadly hampering these industries ; "^nd, the increased price of 

 that out of bond went into private pockets and not to the treasury, 

 thus enabling one pai't of the people to collect taxes from another ; 

 3rd, the increased price thus obtained led to conspiracies on the part 

 of the manufacturers to have the tax nicreased for their own benefit; 

 4th, the evasion of the tax was easy. Thus, while the people had to 



