He fully realised that the word "excise" was obnoxious
to citizens who had migrated from Scotland and Ireland, where the tax
was imposed by a superior force, and in England as well, where it had
been known since Cromwell's day. To these people it meant not only a
tax on liquors, but on candles, salt, vinegar, and other forms of
domestic manufacture. It meant a license to own a gun, and to peddle
small wares. Not many years had passed since Samuel Johnson in his
dictionary had defined it as "a hateful tax levied upon commodities
and adjudged not by the common judges of property but wretches hired
by those to whom it is paid." Added to these inherited prejudices of
the Irish and Scotch-Irish settlers in western Pennsylvania against
the excise was a local complaint that they lacked roads for transporting
their grain across the mountains to market and were prohibited from
floating it down to New Orleans both by the distance and by the
hostility of the Spanish. Their surplus produce must rot unless it
could be manufactured into spirits which could be consumed at home or
carried to a market. A horse, it was said, could carry only four bushels
of grain across the mountains; but he could take twenty-four bushels
when converted into liquor.
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