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when the debt is paid off and the fostering tax withdrawn.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
incessant small motions in Parliament about it, which is the way to
popularise their view. And in the end I do not doubt that they would
have prevailed. They would have had to teach a lesson both pleasant and
true, and such lessons are soon learned. On the whole, therefore, the
result of the comparison is that a Presidential government makes it
much easier than the Parliamentary to maintain a great surplus of
income over expenditure, but that it does not give the same facility
for examining whether it be good or not good to maintain a surplus,
and, therefore, that it works blindly, maintaining surpluses when they
do extreme harm just as much as when they are very beneficial.

In this point the contrast of Presidential with Parliamentary
government is mixed; one of the defects of Parliamentary government
probably is the difficulty under it of maintaining a surplus revenue to
discharge debt, and this defect Presidential government escapes, though
at the cost of being likely to maintain that surplus upon inexpedient
occasions as well as upon expedient. But in all other respects a
Parliamentary government has in finance an unmixed advantage over the
Presidential in the incessant discussion. Though in one single case it