smaller number, these, and a few more, hold claims upon the nation at large, not much short of eight hundred millions. We shall speak of this hereafter. At present, our object is to show how the inequality has arisen; and we expect to trace it to causes of steadily increasing intensity. The success of all political operations depends so much upon finance that even statesmen may be pardoned for sometimes forgetting that political economy is not the whole of political science. We suspect that this error lies near the root of all the disorders of the time. Political economy treats of the production, consumption and distribution of wealth; and, confining its attention to its own proper subject, it treats of the two last only as conducive to the first. In this view, there is no difficulty in showing that the consumption most favorable to continued and increasing production is that which allows to labor precisely that measure of subsistence which shall enable the laborer, day after day, to return to his work, and to breed up as many new laborers as may supply the place of those who may die in the harness. If the demand for labor be stationary, this requires that each man and woman together receive such wages as may maintain the two, and enable them to raise two children, and no more. More than this would be wasted from the fund of new capital, to be employed in new production. Should they, unfortunately, have more than two, one at least should be left to perish-for it is enough for political economy, that none will be starved off but such as can be spared from the great business of production.

Political economy proves, moreover, by arguments that no one pretends to controvert, that the accumulation of capital in a few hands (which is another name for great inequality in the distribution of wealth) is most favorable to the increase of production. Hence she insists that it is unwise in labor to contend for a more equal distribution and consumption, since that would derange the system best calenlated to produce a steady income of the fund to be distributed and consumed. At this point political economy closes the argument. She thinks it unnecessary to add any thing more, and is quite sure that nothing of consequence can be urged on the other side.

But, when we come to examine the modus operandi by which the accumulation of capital in a few hands is to promote production, we find it to be this: The number of

capitalists or employers being small, there will be little competition among them to raise the wages of labor. On the other hand, the laborers being many, the competition between them may be expected to keep down, and even to reduce, the price of labor. Now, as labor is the great instrument of production, and as labor can only work when capital finds work for it, then, the lower the rate of wages, the more labor will a given amount of capital employ, and consequently the greater the production. Q. E. D. And so Juggernaut reaches his temple, followed by a shouting crowd of worshippers, and taking no account of the victims whose mangled limbs strew the path of his triumphal car.

But, while Great Britain was thus prepared to give a fair trial to one principle of the new science of political economy, she was in a condition which made it impossible for her to apply another, and by far the most important of all. The necessities of her treasury, made free trade an impossibility to her. Experience has shown that no tax is so little felt, and so cheerfully paid, as a tax on the exchanges of commerce. A very small part of the burden is borne by him who actually pays it, and that part he is quite willing to bear, because, at the moment, he is reaping his harvest of profit. For thus says political economy:

"Whenever an article is produced by one day's labor of the producer, which another, who has need of it, cannot produce by less than two days' labor, it is better for the latter, by two to one, that he should give the former the price of one day's labor for the article, than that he should produce a like article for himself. If, at the same time, the latter has produced, by one day's labor, a different article, of which the former has need, and which he could not produce by less than two days' labor, it is better, by two to one, for both parties, that they should exchange productions, than that each should produce for himself an article like that produced by the other. In such exchange, each party saves half the price, or, in other words, each makes a profit of 100 per cent. by the exchange."

Two considerations point to this profit on commercial exchanges as the most convenient fund for taxation. He who pays it is in the present receipt of money to meet the demand, and is well aware that only a small part of the burden will rest on him. That part he pays cheerfully, because it is not taken from his previous store, but only so

much deducted from a new acquisition. At such moments men are always found to part with money freely. The tax on legacies is levied on this principle.

A consideration not entitled to so much influence, but which is allowed to have much more, is, that they on whom the burden of the tax actually falls bear it unconsciously, and, therefore, without complaint. The great multitude in the United States cannot be made to understand that they pay anything into the federal treasury, which swallows up ten times as much of their substance as the State taxes, of which they are always complaining.

Besides the facility which the custom house affords for the collection of the tax on foreign exchanges, the protection and facilities afforded to such transactions by govern. ment furnish a fair excuse for imposing it "The laborer is worthy of his hire"-" they that preach the gospel should live by the gospel ;" and, by parity of reason, the navy has a fair claim to be maintained by the commerce which flourishes under its protection. It follows, from all these considerations, that the import is not only the most productive source of revenue, but the last that any government will think of surrendering or curtailing.

But, Great Britain, for the last seventy years, has not been in condition to surrender anything. Staggering under a load of debt, and maintaining a large army, and the largest navy in the world, no retrenchment she can make in her civil list, and other minor branches of expenditure, can have any sensible effect on the amount of revenue necessary to carry on the government. Hence, however sensible of the advantages of free trade to the prosperity of her people, she has never been in condition to avail herself of them. On the contrary, she takes the lion's share of the profit of all exchanges which pass through her custom house. But it is a law of trade, well understood, that this profit, if left to be disposed of by the parties to the exchanges, would be divided equally between the foreign producer of the raw material and the English producer of the manufactured article. Let Great Britain take from this 40 per cent.. by way of impost, and the fund of profit so to be divided will be 60, and not 100. Each party, therefore, loses 20, and thus the foreign chapman is indirectly made to pay 20 per cent. into the British treasury. The foreign nation has no means of preventing this, and can only indemnify itself by an op

eration which shall make the British producer, in the same indirect way, pay 20 per cent. into the treasury of that nation. This is effected by laying a countervailing impost of 40 per cent. on the same fund of profit, which farther reduces that fund to 20, and this is all that remains to be shared between the parties to the exchange. This expedient has been so extensively adopted, that free trade is every where unknown, and that Great Britain, in particular, has derived no benefit from this, which, of all the discoveries of political economy, is most important to individual prosperity.

It is hard to contrive a tax which shall not bear most heavily on the poor, Whether it be a tax on property or on consumption, of which each man will pay only in proportion to what he has, or to what he consumes, there will always be this essential difference between those who have something to spare and those who have nothing; it will be a tax on the superfluities of the one and on the necessaries of the other. An income tax, from which small incomes are exempt, forms the only exception-for a tax on articles the poor man never uses, hardly ever fails to affect the prices of similar articles that he does use. A tax on silks increases the number of those who content themselves with fine cottons, and so raises the price of these, and increases the number of those who must put up with coarse cottons. comes home to the poorest man, and adds a few cents, that he can ill spare, to the cost of his poor wife's Sunday gown. But imposts and excises insinuate themselves into the substance of every thing that the poorest man can eat, drink or wear-so that as the poor woman divided her one potato between her five children, the tax-gatherer stood by and took a child's share. Taxation, in this extent, may be truly said to to grind the faces of the poor." It not only strips the poor man of his covering, but eats into his flesh.

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This

To a certain extent, as we have said, this mischief is unavoidable. But it is sometimes unnecessarily and cruelly aggravated. It rarely happens that they who have the management of public affairs fail to find out that anything that affects injuriously any one interest, may be brought to act beneficially on some other-relatively at least, if not absolutely. The impost is a tax on the exchange of the productions of agriculture, or of the productions of manufacture, for the productions of commerce. If either agri

culture or manufactures can prevail to throw this tax more heavily on the productions of the other than its own, then the one interest is unduly depressed, and the other at least relatively, and often absolutely, advanced. Let the power to make this unequal distribution of the burden coincide with the interest to be advanced, and it will surely be done. This we of the Southern States of this Union know to our cost. In a country like England, the necessary protection of the rights of property is supposed to demand that political power be associated with property; and so it is. As the only visible, tangible and permanent property is land, land has been made the basis, the throne of political power. Hence, the landholder, in his capacity of ruler, has taken care to provide for his interest as an individual, by throwing the burthen of the impost exclusively on the exchanges effected between manufactures and commerce, and to secure to himself a monopoly price in his negotiations with the other two. This monopoly has all the effect of a tax, except that the proceeds of it do not go into the treasury, but into the pockets of the tenantry, to be handed over to the land-lords (significantly so named) in the shape, of extravagant rents. The progressive rise of rents, under this systern, may furnish a sort of measure of the progressive inequality of property produced by it. The productiveness of land remaining the same, every dollar of additional rent is a dollar added to the income of the wealthy landholder, and taken from the consumers of bread. This is the great staple of the land of England, and regulates the price of all the other produce of the soil. This is the poor man's staff of life; and whether the advanced price of bread produced by the corn-laws goes into the treasury, or to the landowner, he, in proportion to his consumption of food, pays more to the tax, or the monopoly, than any other. But what could he do? "Groanings that could not he uttered" were the only voice of his sufferings. Who was there to make intercession for him, and hear and interpret these to the ear of power.

The interest of the manufacturer was identical with his own, but, for a long time, the manufacturer was too prosperous to complain of anything. He lost sight of all this, in the blaze of success which attended his improvements in productive industry by means of machinery. These have been the wonder and glory of the age. At their first ap