8328. TAXES, Abolition of internal.—[further continued] .
The suppression of unnecessary
offices, of useless establishments
and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our
internal taxes. These, covering our land with
officers, and opening our doors to their intrusions,
had already begun that process of
domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is
scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively
every article of produce and property.
If among these taxes some minor ones
fell which had not been inconvenient, it was
because their amount would not have paid the
officers who collected them, and because, if
they had any merit, the State authorities
might adopt them, instead of others less approved.
The remaining revenue on the consumption
of foreign articles, is paid cheerfully
by those who can afford to add foreign
luxuries to domestic comforts, being collected
on our seaboards and frontiers only, and incorporated
with the transactions of our mercantile
citizens, it may be the pleasure and
pride of an American to ask, what farmer,
what mechanic, what laborer, ever sees a tax-gatherer
of the United States? These contributions
enable us to support the current expenses
of the government, to fulfill contracts
with foreign nations, to extinguish the native
right of soil within our limits, to extend those
limits, and to apply such a surplus to our
public debts, as places at a short day their
final redemption; and that redemption once
effected, the revenue thereby liberated may,
by a just repartition among the States, and
a corresponding amendment of the Constitution,
be applied,
in time of peace, to rivers,
canals, roads, arts, manufactures, education,
and other great objects within each State.
In
time of war, if injustice, by ourselves or
others, must sometimes produce war, increased
as the same revenue will be increased
by population and consumption, and aided by
other resources reserved for that crisis, it
may meet within the year all the expenses of
the year, without encroaching on the rights of
future generations, by burdening them with
the debts of the past. War will then be but
a suspension of useful works, and a return
to a state of peace, a return to the progress of
improvement.—
Second Inaugural Address. Washington ed. viii, 40.
Ford ed., viii, 343.
(1805)
