The results of such legislation were immediate and most remarkable. Illicit distillation practically ceased the very hour the new law came into operation. Industry and the arts experienced a large measure of benefit from the reduction in the cost of spirits; while the Government collected during the second year of the continuance of the new rate and system, with comparatively little friction, three dollars for every one that was obtained during the last year of the two-dollar tax. Assuming, as is warranted, that with a continuance of the two-dollar tax there would have been no increase in the revenue from distilled spirits beyond what accrued in 1868—the last year of its existence—the gain in revenue to the Government in the succeeding two years from the adoption of the fifty-cent rate was at least sixty millions of dollars. Furthermore, but for the injudicious but popular speech (to which reference has been made) at an opportune moment in committee by a statesman who had bestowed but little attention to the subject, the reduction of the tax from two dollars to fifty cents per proof gallon would undoubtedly have been anticipated by a year, and attended with like gainful results. The cost of this speech, therefore, to the national Treasury may be rightfully estimated as at least ten millions of dollars. The record of this chapter of the tax experience of the United States also forcibly illustrates the impolicy and disaster of embodying any fiscal policy in statute enactments without a previous study and full comprehension of all the elements involved.
For the first but incomplete fiscal year (1869) under the fifty-cent tax the revenue increased to the extent of nearly $20,000,000, or from $14,290,000 in 1868 to $33,735,000 in 1869; or, including all taxes on the manufacture and sale of distilled spirits, licenses, etc., from $18,655,000 in 1868 to $45,071,000 in 1869. During the next fiscal year (1870) there was a further increase in the total revenue of $10,534,864, or from $45,071,000 in 1869 to $55,606,094 in 1870.
lery or warehouse; and next, that none of the indirect and supplementary taxes could be assessed or collected until after the direct tax (of fifty cents) had been paid; the license taxes, for example, varying according to the product of the distillery, and payable in block, at different specified times. A great and novel object here sought for, namely, of diminishing the inducements to fraud, by directing the collection of the direct and supplementary taxes on spirits as respects persons, places, and times, was fully achieved; for, although the aggregate of the direct and indirect tax on spirits undoubtedly increased their cost to their final consumers, the largest possible gain to the distiller from the evasion of the separate and comparatively small indirect taxes which contributed to this increase, even apart from the risks of punishment involved, were too small to be worthy of his attention. The effort, therefore, to attempt to minimize by sophistical reasoning the remarkable effect of the reduction in 1868 of the tax on distilled spirits to fifty cents has no rightful claim for consideration, and unquestionably was prompted by a very general but unwise public sentiment, that it is desirable always to subject the manufacture and sale of spirituous and fermented liquors to exceptionally high rates of taxation.
