The progress of taxation during the past twenty-five years and present tendencies

The subject tllat has been assigned to me is susceptible of a double treatment. It covers not only the actual changes of a fundamental nature in the practice of taxation, but also the development that has taken place in the governing principles. These, however, are, after all, two phases of the same movement, for the influence of practice and theory is reciprocal. On the one hand, the theories themselves represent an outcome of the facts, for fiscal theory, like all social theory, is but an attempt tQ present an analysis of the living forces at work in inldustrial society. And on the other hand, so far as fiscal theory deals with what ought to be, rather than with what is, it justifies itself only to the extent that its conclusions are approved by the popular mind, and thus become incorporated in the actual bone and sinew of the social organism. Fiscal theory and fiscal practice are the obverse and reverse of the same medal. In the second place, the problem is not only specific but general. As citizens and patriots we are naturally most interested in the problems of our own country; but as scientists, our horizon is a wider one. Science cannot be f-ettered by bonds of national forging. It soars far above such limits. This is especially true of the scientific problems of taxation. It goes, of course, without saying that the fiscal institutions of every country, as all