next too lightly. Now, it is clear on slight thought that any single tax system exaggerates every such unfairness to the utmost, while by settling taxes on many things you tend to offset losses with gains.

More serious still is it that a single tax system of any sort would greatly lack elasticity. To secure this quality, you must tax so many articles that surpluses may be put over against deficits between them, and some of the articles must be of such a nature that the burden upon them may in an emergency be suddenly increased.

No minister of finance will ever have the omniscience to make the revenue and expenditure sides of his yearly budget balance exactly. Income may fall short; it may be redundant. As it is visibly bad policy to plan for an assured surplus, he must each year be prepared to meet a deficit. Now, the most economical way to do this is by an instant increase of taxation on some commodity that will bear it. Any form of impost may be suddenly lowered, but few are those which can with safety be suddenly

raised. A land tax or a house tax is specially ill fitted for this. Income taxes perform the service very neatly; and, as is well known, Great Britain has long resorted to them for this purpose. However, Mr. Goschen's budget of April, 1889, substituted for the usual increased levy on incomes a death or succession tax on estates of $50,000 or more, which has thus far worked well. A tax on liquors has usually been considered the ideal "buffer"; yet even this served Mr. Gladstone ill, ousting him from office by its unpopularity. Obviously, none of the imposts mentioned would serve happily as the substantive tax; but these, or some of them, or others similar, are necessary as ancillary taxes, to render a system supple and safe.

It may be rejoined that this objection is valid only against those who wish the state to take no more rent than is necessary, but not against H. George, who was going to draw all rent into the public treasury, making a deficit impossible.

I reply that inelasticity will balk the single tax plan about equally whether all

rent or only a part is assumed by the state. In neither case can you safely allow a great surplus to lie idle in the treasury. You must appropriate all of it for regular purposes, more or less legitimate. The greater your revenue over the necessary outlays, the less proper will be the objects to which you will apply it; still it must and will be applied. Now, the point is that in an emergency of deficit you will have to withdraw from some of these objects; and, whatever they are, trouble will result. To deprive the people of cheap bread would occasion no less rebellion than to dock wages in army or navy or the salaries of postal clerks.

Again, other taxes than a land tax are needed for regulative and disciplinary purposes. I do not refer primarily to taxation. upon traffic in intoxicants, although there are very strong reasons for supposing this the best means of handling that gigantic evil. The ethical objection to it, that it makes the state partner in crime, I regard as wholly fanciful, deriving its entire force from the double sense of the word "license."

It can be safely said that no modern state ever "licenses" the sale of liquor with the thought of furthering it as a good thing. A liquor tax is of the nature of those amercements anciently so common in English law, intended to repress acknowledged evils, which the state was not yet in condition to handle as crimes in the legal sense. Abolish the word "license" from this discussion, supplying liquor dealers duly "amerced" each with his "bill of amercement" instead of his "license," and the theory of liquor taxation would appear in its proper light.

Nor is this attribution of a punitive character to taxation in certain cases either new or strange. Wagner is by no means its author. From the dawn of Cameral Science, even in Adam Smith's Fifth Book and in Leroy-Beaulieu, where laissez faire is so pronounced, it has been recognized as imperative that taxation should keep in view the great ends of culture and civilization.

But society suffers from other licenses than those to sell liquor, from other monopolies than that of land; and nothing is easier

than to reduce the power of any of these by taxation. It is a great error to suppose that such a burden could be shifted to the purchasers of the monopolized commodity. The paper upon "The Economic Law of Monopoly" presented at the session of the American Social Science Association in 1889, proved that prices under monopoly are fixed, not at all by competition, but according to the "law of the tolerance of the market." That is, they always tend toward the point of maximum gross profits, to which, should they go higher, they would inevitably be brought back by such decrease of sales as would cut down the aggregate income. Tax any line of goods already selling so, and the entire tax must come from the producer; no part of it can be extorted from consumers. The logic here is precisely the same as that which proves it impossible to make rent payers suffer from a tax on rent.

So clear is the chance to touch monopolies through taxation that some might pronounce such taxes no less worthy than a land tax to occupy the substantive place in a