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The oppression of wealth submitted to agrarian laws, or to excessive taxation; the hatred of the lower classes for the upper class, which is exposed always to libellous charges made in hopes of confiscation, these were the features of the Athenian government which were especially revolting to Aristotle, and which caused him to favor a limited monarchy.
In its second report this passage occurs: "It may be doubted, whether the country does contain a sufficient quantity of labour to develope its resources; and while the empire is loaded with taxation to defray the charges of its wars, it appears most politic to use its internal resources for improving the condition of its population, by which the revenue of the exchequer must be increased, rather than encourage emigration, by which the revenue would suffer diminution, or than leave the labouring classes in their present state, by which poverty, crime, and the charges of Government must be inevitably extended."
It is, in the first place, because they do not care to add to discontent by increased taxation all over the country, but "it is still more due to this, that in Germany the classes which have any influence on or control of the Government are the wealthier classes, and the Government have been absolutely afraid to force taxation upon them."
Purchasing power, which may be taken from richer people by taxation, or which may be obtained from "collective" profits on other trading, is in effect transferred to the poor people in question, though the transference is coupled with the condition that the purchasing power must be expended in a particular way.
Great numbers had followed the example set them at Spafields, Bristol, and Bath; others, who had signed the Major's printed petitions, only prayed for all payers of direct taxation to be admitted to the right of voting. On the 20th of January, 1817, five persons were tried at the Old Bailey, for rioting in the City of London, on the day of the second Spafields meeting.
Thus an inconsiderable number of this vilest and most abject of the population oppressed by taxation which was levied exclusively upon the low, and from which not only the great nobles but mechanics and other hidalgos were, exempt had been able to earn and to lay by enough to offer the monarch fifty millions of dollars to purchase themselves out of semi-slavery into manhood, and yet found their offer rejected by an almost insolvent king.
When effects so salutary result from the plans you have already sanctioned; when merely by avoiding false objects of expense we are able, without a direct tax, without internal taxes, and without borrowing to make large and effectual payments toward the discharge of our public debt and the emancipation of our posterity from that mortal canker, it is an encouragement, fellow citizens, of the highest order to proceed as we have begun in substituting economy for taxation, and in pursuing what is useful for a nation placed as we are, rather than what is practiced by others under different circumstances.
A system of taxation upon both exports and imports was introduced, which speedily replenished the treasury. Governor Stuyvesant was a professing christian, being a devout member of the Reformed Church of the fatherland. He promptly transferred his relations to the church at fort Amsterdam.
The means at the disposal of the sovereign were, for that age, truly formidable. His revenue, raised, it is true, by a severe and unequal taxation which pressed heavily on the cultivators of the soil, far exceeded that of any other potentate. His army, excellently disciplined, and commanded by the greatest generals then living, already consisted of more than a hundred and twenty thousand men.
But beginning here about 1893, this form of taxation has now been adopted by nearly all the States, the amount of the tax being graded both according to the relation of the inheritors to the person from whom the succession is derived, and according to the amount of the inheritance itself; the rate of the tax thus varying all the way from an absolute exemption, as to the wife or children, to a tax as high as twenty-five per cent.
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