Walter Bagehot

She is applying all the resources of science and skill and trained labour, which have been in long ages painfully acquired in old countries, to develop with great speed the richest soil and the richest mines of new countries; and the…

Even under a Parliamentary government such a community could and would bear taxation much more easily than Englishmen ever would.

If America was under a Parliamentary government, she would soon be convinced that in maintaining this great surplus and in paying this high taxation she would be doing herself great harm.

She is not performing a great duty, but perpetrating a great injustice.

She is injuring posterity by crippling and displacing industry, far more than she is aiding it by reducing the taxes it will have to pay.

In the first place, the maintenance of the present high taxation compels the retention of many taxes which are contrary to the maxims of free-trade.

Then probably industry will return to its natural channel, the artificial trade will be first depressed, then discontinued, and the fixed capital employed in the trade will all be depreciated and much of it be worthless.

Secondly, all taxes on trade and manufacture are injurious in various ways to them.

You cannot put on a great series of such duties without cramping trade in a hundred ways and without diminishing their productiveness exceedingly.

America is now working in heavy fetters, and it would probably be better for her to lighten those fetters even though a generation or two should have to pay rather higher taxes.

But, like all easy expedients out of a great difficulty, it is accompanied by the greatest evils; if it had not been so, it would have been the regular device in such cases, and the difficulty would have been no difficulty at all; there…

Being a new country, she ought in her times of financial want to borrow of old countries; but the old countries were frightened by the probable issue of unlimited inconvertible paper, and they would not lend a shilling.

The great commercial houses in England are the most natural and most effectual conveyers of intelligence from other countries to Europe.

If they had been financially interested in giving in a sound report as to the progress of the war, a sound report we should have had.

The whole force of the greatest inquiring machine and the greatest discussing machine which the world has ever known would have been directed to this subject.

In a year or two the American public would have had it forced upon them in every form till they must have comprehended it.

But under the Presidential form of government, and owing to the inferior power of generating discussion, the information given to the American people has been imperfect in the extreme.

And in consequence, after nearly ten years of painful experience, they do not now understand how much they have suffered from their inconvertible currency.

But the mode in which the Presidential government of America managed its taxation during the Civil War, is even a more striking example of its defects.

The light would have come from above, not from below--it would have come from Parliament to the nation instead of from the nation to Parliament But exactly the reverse happened in America.

The people of the loyal States were, however, more determined and in earnest in respect to this matter of taxation than were their rulers; and before long the popular discontent at the existing state of things was openly manifest.

The one necessity of the situation was revenue, and to obtain it speedily and in large amounts through taxation the only principle recognised--if it can be called a principle--was akin to that recommended to the traditionary Irishman on…

Wherever you find an article, a product, a trade, a profession, or a source of income, tax it!

The evils of a bad tax are quite sure to be pressed upon the ears of Parliament in season and out of season; the few persons who have to pay it are thoroughly certain to make themselves heard.

The sort of taxation tried in America, that of taxing everything, and seeing what every thing would yield, could not have been tried under a Government delicately and quickly sensitive to public opinion.