is only tolerable so far as it maintains order and justice; this is its only legitimate function. When it attempts didactic legislation-when it attempts to teach the people what branches of honest industry they shall or shall not pursue, it is positive and insupportable evil.

The foregoing considerations lead, of course, to the conclusion that all taxes should be direct and level, ad valorem. They should be levied on all property alike, and on all income alike, with the exception of a certain necessary standard of living, which Government should be careful not to impair, since the ambition of the industrious classes depends largely upon it. Their enterprise and application to labor is affected by it to a degree that has a wide influence on the material and moral welfare of the nation. The higher that standard is fixed by custom and public opinion the fewer persons will be satisfied with a low and grovelling existence, and the greater is, necessarily, the public prosperity.

As self government is the ultimate aim of political science, any other is but a necessary evil to be endured only while and to the extent that the moral and intellectual forces of society are too weak to control the dangerous, and protect the suffering classes without the aid of public authority. Teaching is better than legislating for the public good. No good man needs an exciseman or a constable to tell him what to buy, or sell, or eat, or drink, or wear, or how to perform his part in life, and the hand of authority is badly employed when it tends to depress the ambition or check the honest industry of any one.

The theory which looks to Government as a teacher or a director is, to my apprehension, altogether a mistake; Government is formed, or ought to be, not to teach the people but to be taught by them; its authority is limited by their average intelligence and sense of justice, and when it attempts to extend its power beyond this limit, as, for instance, in the support of the institution of slavery in this country, it is sure to be resisted until the iniquity is destroyed. The tariff system of taxation, which stands at the mouths of our harbors to drive away our customers and cripple the commerce and industry of the country, is another of these iniquities that the intelligence and true democracy of the nation have marked for speedy destruction.

Levy and level the taxes ad valorem and they will not affect prices in the slightest degree; both the domestic and international exchanges will be made at prices the same precisely as if there were no taxes at all. This is obvious from the proposition with which we started, the correctness of which no thinker will dispute, that general prices conform to the volume of currency and its relation to circulating capital. Double the currency, or reduce the circulating capital one-half; either will depreciate the value of money or currency one-half in a rise of 100 per cent. of general prices. Reduce the currency one half, or double the circulating capital; either will appreciate the value of money or currency 100 per cent. in a fall of 50 per cent. of general prices.

People do not consider as they should-and legislators are culpably neglectful of the economical fact- that payment is made in value, not in price. Suppose a farmer to have 100 bushels of wheat on which he is taxed one per cent., then one bushel goes to pay the Government, and ninety-nine to satisfy other demands. But suppose the tax to be five per

There are then two separate burdens imposed on consumers by a tariff on imports-first, the price added to both the taxed and the protected commodities, the latter being many times greater than the former, which sum is paid affirmatively by the consumers of the products immediately affected thereby; and second, the sum of currency abstracted from the normal remuneration of all other industries but those protected by the tariff, which sum is paid negatively but not less certainly by the unprotected classes.

There can be no objection to low and natural general prices, because, with a normal currency, they must be the consequence of activity of production, an increase of wealth, and abundance of capital in relation to currency-in other words, a high value of money, which increases the exports of merchandise: but there is an insurmountable objection to low and unnatural special prices, made so by abstracting currency from the use of one producer to give it to another through legislation, for this is but a form of robbery.

It is my opinion that the noticeable general disinclination to agricultural labor in this country is largely owing to the fact that it is the great unprotected branch of industry here. It is underpaid that other industries may be overpaid. Notwithstanding the co-operation of natural forces, working for nothing here with greater power than anywhere else on the globe, the farmer finds relatively small pay for hard work, and men are enticed away from this invigorating and naturally profitable em ployment, to seek ventures in crowded cities, and unwholesome work in manufacturing towns, to which the intermeddling of Government gives an unnatural incentive and reward at the cost of agriculture. The result is the production of commodities that could be produced cheaper in money value, and with more public advantage in the spread of population, in the more extensive cultivation of the soil, the greater vigor, the better health, and the more general intelligence and happiness of the people, by a normal application of their industry, on the land and on the water, through the exchanges of an unshackled commerce.

It is no argument against this to say that the nation thrives. However it may check its thriving the task would be difficult for Government to prevent it. Such are the vast resources of the country in cheap and rich lands and inexhaustible mines-as the London Economist says, "the best things on the earth and under the earth"-accessible by many thousand miles of free navigation of rivers and lakes, a varie climate, favoring the production of almost everything that agriculture can furnish desirable to man, with ship timber, naval stores, forests of exportable lumber for housebuilding, numerous and secure harbors on an extended ocean coast; in short, all the most beneficent powers and capabilities of nature attracting immigration and co-operating with a high degree of intelligence, industry, and enterprise, among the laboring classes, what but madness on the part of the Government can prevent the advance of the nation in material prosperity Yet nature triumphs over an adverse legislation at a vast and needless cost to individuals of wealth and peace of mind, Nowhere else under the sun is bankruptcy in trade so general, success in life so various and uncertain, and anxiety in families, aud unhappiness in society on the whole, so great. We prosper in spite of the Government, which

ment for the purpose; and the energies of consumption it developed stimulated in like degree the vast energies of production in which, with special reference to the commodities most needed in war, no nation on the globe is more powerful than the United States.

So long as the capital of each producer is promptly replaced, that is to say, his present capital, which includes of course his invested capital and profits, the more consumption of his products, and the quicker the better, because the greater will be the employment of industry and the opportunities of saving, and the greater the national wealth. People argue on this subject as if capital were not consumed in peace. How long is it profitable to the producer of a finished article, or to the commerce of the country, to keep it unsold or unconsumed? Clearly until a buyer is ready to replace the capital it contains, and not a moment longer. It is only at the seat of war, where the means of reproduction are destroyed, that war, in the material or financial point of view, is necessarily unprofitable. Napoleon was careful to remove this from France-to fight on other soil than his own; so far he was a good political economist, and France never prospered more in wealth and population than during his wars against all the rest of Europe. Mankind people up to the means of maintenance, especially to the supply of food, and where these are steadily increasing population increases in like proportion, whether in war or peace.

No doubt the revolted States lost capital by the rebellion, since they used up and suffered the loss to a great extent of their means of reproduction; but the vast productive powers of the West and North were so stimulated at the same time that they have been enriched more than the South has been impoverished, and the national wealth, reckoning the negroes, before and since, as they always were, labor and not capital, is to my apprehension no less to day, in the aggregate, than it would have been without the war.

I have not space in this article to discuss more fully the point of the relation of war to public wealth, and I offer these remarks upon it merely to give the reader assurance that a tariff or unequal taxation was not necessary for the conduct of the war that is just closed. I have acted with the Republican party in support of the fundamental Democratic principle of human freedom, but with a continual protest against their financial policy; and I maintain that the present abnormal condition of the national finances is owing not necessarily to the war, but to an unequal and unjust distribution of its burdens, and to an unpardonable ignorance of the nature of money and of the fundamental principles of economical science.

Instead of taxing the rich and the bank stockholders for their share of the cost of the war, Government has borrowed capital of the former, and granted to the latter the privilege of kiting, against public and private debt, a currency consisting of bank notes and book credits, miscalled "deposits," on which the people are obliged, from the necessity of the case, to lend their capital for nothing and pay interest on it besides, not for the benefit of the Government or of themselves, but for the benefit of the currency makers. These two classes, therefore, instead of being, like the rest of the people, payers of taxes, are made receivers of taxes, and the burden of supporting the war and a needless public debt has been thrown upon the poorer and the hard-working classes, who are the least able to

bear it. Of course this cripples their means of consumption, and, as they are the great consumers, their forced abstinence reacts upon production, crippling that and necessarily the general trade of the country. As a nation we are in the absurd and paradoxical position of having paid for the war to the last dime out of our own capital and at the same time we are owing for a great portion of it to certain of our own citizens, because we have neglected to collect from them their share of its cost. Such is the preposterous nature of the funding system.

RAILROAD EARNINGS FOR OCTOBER.

The gross earnings of the under-mentioned railroads for the month of October, 1866 and 1867, comparatively, and the difference (increase or decrease) between the two periods, are exhibited in the following state

By reason of the refusal of the St. Paul Company to furnish us the October earnings of their several lines separately, we have been compelled to give the earnings of the Wisconsin lines (usually reported by us in our monthly summary) and those of the line in Iowa and Minnesota (135 miles) as a whole. This somewhat deranges our tables, as the October mileage is so much larger than the mileage of the previous months of the year, and cannot be compared with those months in gross. The discrepancy, however, disappears in the subjoined table which shows the miles of railroad operated and the gross earnings per mile for the cor

responding month of the two years 1866 and 1867, as deduced from the figures of the preceding statement:

From these deductions it is very apparent that the increase shown in August and September has been continued on an enlarged scale in October. As compared with the earnings of the corresponding months of 1866, those of 1867 were in excess-in August $38 per mile, or 4.09 per cent.; in September $63 per mile, or 6.25 per cent., and in October $123 per mile, or 10.72 per cent. The highest (October) of the year, and the lowest (February) compare together, and with the monthly average as

These figures certainly show that October, 1867, has been an extraor dinarily prosperous month; indeed, the most prosperous as yet in the annals of American railroading. As indicating the commercial movement it assures us that the country generally is in a high state of activity, although in some branches of industry there may be a lack of vitality The movement of the grain crops has, no doubt, contributed most largely to the sum total earned; but there is also a westward movement which will probably grow heavier as the season advances, and the grain excitement subsides, the Western consumers of merchandise having made sufficient money from the sale of their produce to warrant a liberal expenditure in the seaboard cities and manufacturing districts.