Indeed, the action of the nation in such an emergency would determine
whether it was at the mercy of State aid and protection or whether it
could care for itself.
If one were attempting to predict at what point of national
administration rebellion would arise, he would no doubt choose taxation.
The hostility of the people toward taxation, possibly engendered in
the Revolutionary days, and exaggerated by human nature, has been
described in previous pages. One of the objections to the Constitution
had been that the people could now be taxed by two agencies, State and
nation, thereby involving double taxes. The resistance to the excise
tax, which began to be manifest in a small way soon after its
institution in 1791, bore a striking resemblance to the rebellion
against the stamp-tax levied by Britain upon the colonists a generation
before. A tax levied on imported goods, collected at the ports, quietly
added to the original cost, and, therefore, a kind of external tax,
is never so objectionable as one paid directly out of hand, and hence
an internal tax. So little in evidence is an external tax that the
people are sometimes beguiled into questioning whether the producer
or the consumer pays the tax.
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