So marked has been this class legislation in the interest of capital, that a Senator of the United States, Mr. Wallace of Pennsylvania, says, "From the beginning of the present Administration down to the adjournment of Congress in August, 1876, every financial statute has had but one purpose, and that purpose to increase the value of the bonded indebtedness of the Government." Statistics show how insecure is business, on what vicious principles it is transacted, and how rapidly property is concentrating in the hands of a few. In 1874 there were 5,830 failures for a total of $155,000,000, and in 1875 the failures increased to 7,740, aggregating a loss of $201,000,000. In both North and South there has been a frightful increase of indebtedness by towns and cities, counties and States--thirty-eight States owe an aggregate of $382,000,000--so that taxpayers groan in purse and spirit, and are deeply concerned to find a way of honest payment.
Taxation has been and is a potent instrument of wrong and corruption. To pay the national debt increased taxation was, of course, necessary and proper, but taxation should have been adjusted to the rights of honest creditors and the lessened pecuniary ability of taxpayers. The Federal and local taxes of the last eleven years, according to high authority, amount to not less than $7,500,000,000. Never in modern times was revenue collected in such a complicated and ruinous manner. Mr. Curtis tells us one-fourth of the revenue is lost in the collection. If the collection and expenditure of revenue be the tests for determining the wisdom of a government, then ours is not "the best the world ever saw."
Extravagant expenditure is closely connected with enormous revenues. Economy of administration is a lost art. Federal expenditure in 1860, exclusive of payment of public debt, was $1.94 per head. In 1870 it was $3.52 per head, and in 1875 $3.38. The $4,500,000,000 of Federal taxes[7] of the last eleven years have not been exclusively appropriated to reduction of debt and defraying necessary expenditures. Officials have been needlessly multiplied, jobs have been created, peculation is common, and millions have been squandered on contracts made with hungry partisans. Such an exhaustion of national resources is governmental robbery. In the purer days it was a political maxim that no more money was to be taken from the people than was necessary for the constitutional and economical wants of the Government. Large revenues and large expenditures are mutually recreative. Mr. Calhoun, the most sagacious and philosophical statesman of this century, said, in 1839, "I am disposed to regard it as a political maxim in free States, that an impoverished treasury, once in a generation at least, is almost indispensable to the preservation of their institutions and liberty." All experience shows that excessive revenue and large expenditures increase the patronage of the government and corrupt public and private morals. Some palliation may be found in the fact that wars are demoralizing, necessitate much assumption of power, and that our conflict was gigantic; but after all due allowances the corruptions in America must find a parallel in that period of English history when the sovereign was the pensioner of a foreign potentate. The centennial anniversary of our republic finds a record so scandalous that all honest men blush, and the Fourth of July eulogists have to make the humiliating confession of much of vice and shame in our national life, of a decline from the former high standard of political and moral purity, and of the blister of corruption in high places, upon Executive and judiciary, upon laws, and on the acts of prominent officials. (See speeches of Dr. Storrs and Hon. C. F. Adams.)