The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866, page 189 by Various Authors
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by our Executive. They placed the Provinces on the true ground by their proffered concessions and offers to negotiate, and can stand at home upon the ground they took, while their course in retiring after the rebuff they received from the committee was dignified and judicious. When Congress has disposed of reconstruction, and found leisure to attend to revenue and finance; when it sees that we need new materials for our rising manufactures, and require access both by the east and the west to the exhaustless pine forests of Canada,[G] to provincial oats and barley, purchasable at rates lower than those at which the West can afford to send them, and to coal on coasts which Nature designed for the supply of the gas-works and steamers of New England; when it finds proclamations issued excluding our fishermen from the waters to which the mackerel resort,--then Congress at last will doubtless be willing to resume negotiations, and to give to us coal, wood, butter, grain, fish, lumber, and horses at reasonable prices.
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Eliminating from the summary of the Commission the items which are condemned by their Report, we have the following result:--
REVENUE LIST OF COMMISSIONERS, EXCLUDING TAXES ON INCOME AND TRANSPORTATION.
Customs, $130,000,000 Excise on Spirits, Tobacco, Malt Liquors Cotton, Refined Oil, Spirits of Turpentine, and Rosin, 108,000,000 Licenses, 15,000,000 Salaries, 2,000,000 Banks, 15,000,000 Stamps, 20,000,000 Sales, Legacies, &c., 7,000,000 Add Tax on Dividend and Coupons, 10,000,000 Miscellaneous, 21,000,000 ----------- Total $328,000,000
Amount deemed necessary by the Secretary of the Treasury to meet Interest and Expenses of Government annually, 284,000,000 ----------- Surplus, $44,000,000
We thus deduce from the estimate of the Secretary and the conclusions to which we are led by the Commission a surplus revenue or sinking fund of $44,000,000, and this, too, after discontinuing all taxes on production, income, and transportation, and liberating indu