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5. Samuel J. Tilden, Taxation in the United States. Its Enormous Burden upon the Productive Labor of Our Country. Its Continuance UNNECESSARY—How the Evil May Be Remedied by a CHANGE OF MEASURES AND MEN: Speech of the Hon. Samuel L. Tilden, at Chatham, Columbia Co., N.Y. Sept. 24, 1868 (N.p., [1868?]). (16 p.)
Speech on the taxation in the United States with comparisons to tax systems in Europe. The speaker debunks arguments for sustaining the current rate of taxation. For example, he rejects the notion that the national treasury should be used for programs designed to assist former slaves in their transformation as free citizens. “The men of the South, who have lived in the same community with the negro, with whom he is acquainted, with whom he has relations, are better custodians of his safety and his prosperity than we [Republicans in the North] are. We cannot stretch our hands a thousand miles to establish a police over the relations of the white man and the black man in Mississippi or Louisiana. We may spend one hundred or two hundred millions a year in trying to do it, but we cannot.”