| Year. | Number of indentur'd laborers imported from India. | Number of time-expired immigrants who returned to India. | Value in dollars of money and ornaments carried back to India by returning immigrants. | Number of East Indian depositors in the Gov't Savings Bank. | Total amount of their deposits, in dollars. | Number of planters convicted of offenses against immigrants. | Death rate per 1,000 among indentured laborers. | General death rate of the colony. |
| 1886 | 4,796 | 1,889 | 111,775 | 5,558 | 425,956 | 9 | 27.40 | 25.56 |
| 1887 | 3,928 | 1,420 | 92,613 | 5,821 | 438,600 | 4 | 23.20 | 32.41 |
| 1888 | 2,771 | 1,938 | 95,074 | 5,904 | 457,886 | 1 | 19.73 | 29.27 |
| 1889 | 3,573 | 2,042 | 112,124 | 6,802 | 513,220 | 1 | 12.57 | 28.13 |
| 1890 | 3,432 | 2,125 | 142,611 | 7,269 | 558,734 | 3 | 20.40 | 39.80 |
| 1891 | 5,229 | 2,151 | 134,225 | 6,398 | 515,246 | 2 | 20.40 | 37.00 |
| 1892 | 5,241 | 2,014 | 97,529 | 6,085 | 527,203 | 1 | 25.20 | 39.00 |
| 1893 | 4,146 | 1,848 | 104,763 | 6,179 | 544,420 | 1 | 24.91 | 35.00 |
| 1894 | 9,585 | 1,998 | 113,308 | 6,128 | 529,161 | 2 | 24.22 | 33.53 |
| 1895 | 2,425 | 2,071 | 119,289 | 4,950 | 453,950 | 1 | 20.36 | 29.58 |
| 1896 | 2,408 | 2,059 | 76,470 | 4,520 | 434,759 | 1 | 16.50 | 24.10 |
[13] "Senator Paddock: I should like to ask the Senator from Nevada if, in the region of country where borax is found, by reason of finding it the land in the particular State or Territory is appreciated in value on account of its existence.
"Senator Stewart: Not at all.
"Senator Paddock: The value then given to it is all in labor."—Congressional Record, July, 1890.
[14] "In America, where there has been but little serious study of taxation, the few writers of prominence are, remarkable to relate, almost all abject followers of Thiers," the French economist and statesman, who claimed to have invented the term "diffusion" of taxes.
[15] "Our conclusion is, that under actual conditions in America to-day the landowner may virtually be declared to pay in the last instance the taxes that are imposed on his land, and that at all events it is absolutely erroneous to assume any general shifting to the consumer. In so far as our land tax is a part of a general property tax, it can not possibly be shifted; in so far as it is more or less an exclusive tax, it is even then apt to remain where it is first put—on the landowner."—Seligman: Incidence of Taxation, p. 99.
[16] Seligman. Shifting and Incidence of Taxation.
[17] Professor Marshall.
[18] In a like experience the Duke of Argyll, in his work The Unseen Foundations of Society, finds an explanation of the so-called theory of Ricardo, that the rent which a farmer of agricultural land pays as the price of its hire—that is to say, the price which he pays for the exclusive use of it—is no part of the cost of the crops he may raise upon it; a conclusion that can not be possibly true, unless it be also true that rent is paid for something that is not an indispensable condition of agricultural production. "Thus rights are in their very nature impalpable and invisible. They are not material things, but relations between many material things and the human mind and will. The right of exclusive use over land is a thing invisible and immaterial, as other rights are, and, although it is, and has been since the world began, the basis of all agricultural industry, it is a basis impalpable and invisible, whereas the material visible implements and tools, whose work depends upon it, are all visible and palpable enough, and all of which would never be were we to see them without the invisible rights upon which they depend. All of the former, in their place and order, are instruments of production; all of them catch the eye, and may easily engross the attention. On the other hand, if we are induced to forget those other elements, which are equally essential instruments of production, merely because they are out of sight, then our deception may be complete, and fallacies which become glaring when memory and attention are awakened may find in our half-vacant minds an easy and even a cordial reception."
Adam Smith may be fairly considered as having fully committed himself beyond all controversy in his great work, The Wealth of Nations, to the principle that taxes, with a degree of infallibility, diffuse themselves when they are levied uniformly on the same article; and he even goes so far as to admit that a tax upon labor, if it could be uniformly levied and collected, would be diffused, and that the laborer would be the mere conduit through which the tax would pass to the public treasury. Thus he says, "While the demand for labor and the price of provisions, therefore, remain the same, a direct tax upon wages can have no other effect than to raise them somewhat higher than the tax."