er; it
will make your present life in office unbearable and uncomfortable by
the hundred modes in which a free people can, without ceasing, act upon
the rulers which it elected yesterday, and will have to reject or
re-elect to-morrow. In finance the most striking effect in America
has, on the first view of it, certainly been good. It has enabled the
Government to obtain and to keep a vast surplus of revenue over
expenditure. Even before the Civil War it did this--from 1837 to 1857.
Mr. Wells tells us that, strange as it may seem, "there was not a
single year in which the unexpended balance in the National
Treasury--derived from various sources--at the end of the year, was not
in excess of the total expenditure of the preceding year; while in not
a few years the unexpended balance was absolutely greater than the sum
of the entire expenditure of the twelve months preceding". But this
history before the war is nothing to what has happened since. The
following are the surpluses of revenue over expenditure since the end
of the Civil War:--

Year ending June 30. Surplus. (pounds)

1866 . . . . . . . . 5,593,000
1867 . . . . . . . . 21,586,000
1868 . . . . . . . . 4,242,000
1869 . . . . . . . . 7,418,000
1870 . . . . . . . . 18,627,000
1871 . . . . . . . . 16,712,000

No one who knows anything of the working of Parliamentary government,
will for a moment imagine that any Parliament would have allowed any
executive to keep a surplus of this magnitude. In England, after the
French war, the Government of that day, which had brought it to a happy
end, which had the glory of Waterloo, which was in consequence
exceedingly strong, which had besides elements of strength from close
boroughs and Treasury influence such as certainly no Government has
ever had since, and such perhaps as no Government ever had before--that
Government proposed to keep a moderate surplus and to apply it to the
reduction of the debt, but even this the English Parliament would not
endure. The administration with all its power derived both from good
and evil had to yield; the income tax was abolished, with it went the
surplus, and with the surplus all chance of any considerable reduction
of the debt for that time. In truth taxation is so painful that in a
sensitive community which has strong organs of expression and action,
the maintenance of a great surplus is excessively di