“No governments,” he asks, “decline to dirty their hands delving for boodle? Oh, ye prayerful pirates! Lineal descendants of the bushwhacker princes who preferred clubs to spades! Below their dignity to cut wood, but did cut purses and throats. Too highborn to clean out a pig-sty, but did clean out peddlers and often whole caravans.
“And now the descendants of those beautiful buccaneers, too proud to mine or farm, but not ashamed to fall upon a poor farmer’s homestead and confiscate his last horse! Not too dignified to hold up a crippled huckster and collar two-thirds of his hard earned pennies. Too sensitive to work the windlass of a silvermine, but rough-handed enough to wring silver from a consumptive shopkeeper. Our grandiose rulers, I should say, are in small business when they break in to snatch a widow’s kettle and cot-bed.
“Yet that’s done every day in the year. Statistics claim that somewhere on earth a child is born every second. And at least every minute sees the birth of a child that will have to die of hunger, because its mother’s bread has been filched by tax-collectors.
“Have Governments a right to supply their needs at the expense of widows and orphans, while thousands of able-bodied young men stand ready to earn revenue for them?”
High tariff bullies, says the Russian reformer, are marine highway robbers. At first sight, the burden of spoliation seems shifted to the shoulders of foreigners, but, look closer, and you find natives obliged to buy imports at extortion rates.
Passengers, waiting to be examined by custom-house officers, says Bakunin, always remind him of travelers, lined up to be searched by footpads.
“How commerce revives,” he says, “wherever those shackles are partly removed! How would it flourish if they were altogether abolished? Traffic that now obliges skippers to starve their sailors could be made abundantly profitable.”
A hundred years before the birth of Henry George, a revenue system, closely resembling the “Single Tax” plan, was recommended by the father of Gabriel Mirabeau, and by the Roget School of French Communists.
“It would relieve some classes of our wage-earners,” says Bakunin, “but would burden others, and why harass them, if we can undoubtedly find ways to get along without direct taxation?”
Why make land the scapegoat of a sin that might be avoided?