Some part of the difference between England and America arises undoubtedly not from political causes but from economical.  America is not a country sensitive to taxes; no great country has perhaps ever been so unsensitive in this respect; certainly she is far less sensitive than England.  In reality America is too rich; daily industry there is too common, too skilful, and too productive, for her to care much for fiscal burdens.  She is applying all the resources of science and skill and trained labour, which have been in long ages painfully acquired in old countries, to develop with great speed the richest soil and the richest mines of new countries; and the result is untold wealth.  Even under a Parliamentary government such a community could and would bear taxation much more easily than Englishmen ever would.

But difference of physical character in this respect is of little moment in comparison with difference of political constitution.  If America was under a Parliamentary government, she would soon be convinced that in maintaining this great surplus and in paying this high taxation she would be doing herself great harm.  She is not performing a great duty, but perpetrating a great injustice.  She is injuring posterity by crippling and displacing industry, far more than she is aiding it by reducing the taxes it will have to pay.  In the first place, the maintenance of the present high taxation compels the retention of many taxes which are contrary to the maxims of free-trade.  Enormous customs duties are necessary, and it would be all but impossible to impose equal excise duties even if the Americans desired it.  In consequence, besides what the Americans pay to the Government, they are paying a great deal to some of their own citizens, and so are rearing a set of industries which never ought to have existed, which are bad speculations at present because other industries would have paid better, and which may cause a great loss out of pocket hereafter when the debt is paid off and the fostering tax withdrawn.  Then probably industry will return to its natural channel, the artificial trade will be first depressed, then discontinued, and the fixed capital employed in the trade will all be depreciated and much of it be worthless.  Secondly, all taxes on trade and manufacture are injurious in various ways to them.  You cannot put on a great series of such duties without cramping trade in a hundred ways and without diminishing their productiveness exceedingly.  America is now working in heavy fetters, and it would probably be better for her to lighten those fetters even though a generation or two should have to pay rather higher taxes.  Those generations would really benefit, because they would be so much richer that the slightly increased cost of government would never be perceived.  At any rate, under a Parliamentary government this doctrine would have been incessantly inculcated; a whole party would have made it their business to preach it, would have made