there is no solid South, no solid North; but each member of the king dom is dependent upon all the rest. The art begins with the field-hand who first stirs the soil and plants the seed, and ends only when the finished goods are placed upon the shelves of those who distribute them. Each member of the craft depends upon all, and the whole structure of society, North and South, is twisted into the strand and interwoven in the web that constitutes the product of the cotton-field and of the cottonmill.

So, also, in the art of government, all interests are harmonious. In the question of good money; in that of equal and just taxation, whether under an excise law or a tariff act; in assuring integrity and efficiency in office; in peace, order, and industry, there is no North, no South, no East, no West: but in both existing parties, and in all sections, there are different minds, different motives, and different methods proposed to attain these ends. These are the great questions of the future, on which the welfare of all depends, without distinction of section, race, or party, as parties now exist.

It is one of the plainest facts to one who comes among you simply as a student of events, and who addresses you with no reference to the pending election, that your solid South is being rent by forces that will bring right-minded men of the South into zealous coöperation with likeminded men of the North; that your future leaders will be those whose interests are in the living present, and that your own dead past will bury its dead. We can see more clearly than you can yourselves that the color line is fading away; that if any city, county, or State attempts to deny to any man, black or white, the right to speak, act, and vote as he pleases, that section is becoming poor. Emigrants shun it, self-respecting white laborers leave it, and its colored laborers remain only until they can get means to move away.

We see other sections of your Southern land that are more wise, where the black man is permitted to have the white man's chance; where schools are maintained and justice is assured; and these sections are becoming rich and prosperous. For such examples one need not go beyond Atlanta and Chattanooga. One need only to illustrate the process to which I have referred by one of many cases that I could cite where the negro farmer who had migrated from one State where he was abused to another where he was trusted, and, in the second year from that time, received from a banker an advance of one thousand dollars on the cotton crop that he and his children had made, and used the money to pay for the land that he had hired.

More potent than prejudice or passion these great forces slowly but surely work. They may be retarded, but cannot be stopped. Liberty and justice shall surely govern this fair land.

Such is always the imperative law: no man's property is safe, and no man's welfare is assured, where justice is denied to the poor, or where crime goes unpunished; no State can prosper, however rich the land or varied the resources, where human rights are not respected. If States cannot or do not govern themselves justly, and accord an equal chance to all their citizens, their influence in the councils of the nation must be small indeed. But wherever I have been I find great changes have been made, and these great forces working,-on all your lines of railroad new enterprise, thrift, and energy, towns increasing and cities growing; and, as I have said, the color line is fading in these places, whatever may be the case in the interior. I trust the progress I have noted where I have been may be but the symbol of other districts and other States. If it is not, none know the facts as well as you yourselves, and none can assure the remedy except yourselves. By your own acts you shall be justified; and, when the end is reached, what grander chapter in history will ever have been recorded than that which is being now written?

I had read the Scripture where it is written that men should convert their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; but in your neighboring city of Chattanooga I also saw the battery that had belched forth fire and death converted into a fountain of living water to nourish the new industry of the new South.

As you convert the darkness of oppression and slavery to liberty and justice, so shall you be judged by men and by Him who created all the nations of the earth.

David Ames Wells.

BORN in Springfield, Mass., 1828.

THE OLD AND THE NEW IDEAS IN TAXATION.

[Second Report of the Commissioners to Revise the Laws for the Assessment, etc., of Taxes in the State of New York. 1872.]

THE

HE first attempt made to tax money at interest was instigated against money-lenders because they were Jews; but the Jew was sufficiently shrewd to charge the full tax over to the Christian borrower, including a percentage for annoyance and risk; and now most Christian

countries, as the result of early experience, compel or permit the Jew to enter the money-market, and submit, without let or hindrance, his transactions to the "higher law" of trade and political economy. But a class yet exist who would persecute a Jew if he is a money-lender, and they regret that the good old times of roasting him have passed away. They take delight in applying against him, in taxation, rules of evidence admissible in no court since witches have ceased to be tried and condemued. They sigh at the suggestion that all inquisitions shall be abolished; they consider oaths, the rack, the iron boot and the thumbscrew as the visible manifestations of equality. They would tax primarily everything to the lowest atom; first for national purposes, and then for State and local purposes, through separate boards of assessors. They would require every other man to be an assessor or collector, and it is not probable that the work could then be accomplished with accuracy. The average consumption of every inhabitant of this State (New York), annually, is at least $200, or in the aggregate, $800,000,000; and this immense amount would fail to be taxed if the assessment was made at the end of the year, and not daily, as fast as consumption followed production. All this complicated machinery of infinitesimal taxation and mediæval inquisition is to be brought into requisition for the purpose of taxing "money property," which is nothing but a myth. The moneylender parts with his property to the borrower, who puts it in the form of new buildings, or other improvements, upon which he pays a tax. Is not one assessment on the same property sufficient? But if you insist upon another assessment on the money-lender, it requires no prophetic power to predict that he will add the tax in his transactions with the borrower. If a tax of ten per cent. was levied and enforced on every bill of goods, or note given for goods, the tax would be added to the price of goods, and how would this form of tax be different from the tax on the goods?

"Money property" except in coin is imaginary, and cannot exist. There are rights to property of great value. The right to inherit property is valuable; and a mortgage on land is a certificate of right or interest in the property, but it is not the property. Land under lease is as much "money property" as a mortgage on the same land; both will yield an income of money. Labor will command money, and is a valuable power to acquire property, but is not property. If we could make property by making debts, it cannot be doubted that a national debt would be a national blessing. Attacking the bugbear of "money property" is an assault on all property; for "money property" is the mere representative of property. If we tax the representative, the tax must fall upon the thing represented.

A traveller in the Okefinokee swamp slaps the mosquitoes off his

right cheek only to find that they immediately alight upon his left cheek; and that when he has driven them from thence, they return and alight on his nose; and that all the time he loses blood as a genuine primary or secondary tax-payer. And so it is with taxation. If we live in any country not wholly barbarous, we cannot escape it; and it is the fate of man to bear his proportion of its burdens in proportion to his expense, property, and consumption. The main question of interest and importance in connection with the subject, therefore, is, shall we have an economical system (and hence a species of labor-saving machine), and a uniform and honest system; or one that is expensive and encourages dishonesty and is arbitrary and inquisitorial? In either case the taxcollector will act the part of the mosquito, and will get blood from all; but in an honest and economical system he will get no unnecessary blood.

WANTS.

[Why We Trade and How We Trade. 1888.]

WANTS have their origin in human nature, and are practically

illimitable. No one ever has all he wants, though pretension may be made to that effect. In general, every one satisfies his wants by his own labor; but no man who is not a savage or a Robinson Crusoe ever attempts to obtain all he wants by his own labor directly, or from the products of one locality; and nature evidently never intended that it should be otherwise. For there is no nation, or country, or community, nor probably any one man, that is not, by reason of differences in soil, climate, physical or mental capacities, at advantage or disadvantage as respects some other nation, country, community, or men, in producing or doing something useful. It is only a brute, furthermore, as economists have long recognized, that can find a full satisfaction for its desires in its immediate surroundings; while poor indeed must be the man of civilization that does not lay every quarter of the globe under contribution every morning for his breakfast. Hence-springing out of this diversity in the powers of production, and of wants in respect to locations and individuals-the origin of trade. Hence its necessity and advantage; and the man who has not sufficient education to read the letters of any printed book perceives by instinct, more clearly, as a general rule, than the man of civilization, that if he can trade freely, he can better his condition and increase the sum of his happiness; for the first thing the savage, when brought in contact with civilized man, wants to do, is to exchange; and the first effort of every new settlement in any

new country, after providing temporary food and shelter, is to open a road or other means of communication to some other settlement, in order that they may trade or exchange the commodities which they can produce to advantage, for the products which some others can produce to greater advantage. And, obeying this same natural instinct, the heart of every man, that has not been filled with prejudice of race or country, or perverted by talk about the necessity of tariffs and customhouses, experiences a pleasurable emotion when it learns that a new road has been opened, a new railroad constructed, or that the time of crossing the seas has been greatly shortened; and if to-day it could be announced that the problem of aërial navigation had been solved, and that hereafter everybody could go everywhere, with all their goods and chattels, for one-tenth of the cost and in one-tenth of the time that is now required, one universal shout of jubilation would arise spontaneously from the whole civilized world. And why? Simply because everybody would feel that there would be forthwith a multitude of new wants, an equal multitude of new satisfactions, an increase of business in putting wants and satisfactions into the relations of equations in which one side would balance the other, and an increase of comfort and happiness everywhere.

I

William James Stillman.

BORN in Schenectady, N. Y., 1828.

JOHN RUSKIN.

[The Century Magazine. 1888.]

WAS sitting one afternoon with Longfellow, on the porch of the old house at Cambridge, when the conversation turned on intellectual development, and he referred to a curious phenomenon, of which he instanced several cases, and which he compared to the double stars, of two minds not personally related but forming a binary system, revolving simultaneously around each other and around some principle which they regarded in different lights. I do not remember his instances, but that which at once came to my mind was the very interesting one of Turner and Ruskin. The complementary relation of the great writer and the imaginative painter is one of the most-indeed the most-interesting that I know in intellectual history: the one a master in all that belongs to verbal expression, but singularly deficient in the gifts of the artist, feeble in drawing, with a most inaccurate perception of color and no