buildings, furniture, doors and windows, on income from land and from all trades and professions, a tax which dubiously recalls the veritable Income Tax.

Germany imposes an income tax on all incomes over $750, and the tax rate increases with the increase of the personal revenue; many exemptions obtain and there are varying regulations appropriate for its more equal or just imposition.

There is no Income Tax in Hungary. Italy has a graduated Income Tax. In the Netherlands there is a property tax imposed upon incomes derived from capital, as well as a tax on incomes earned by labor. Norway, Spain and Switzerland all have the Income Tax; also Cape Colony, New South Wales, New Zealand, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania.

In 1861, in the United States, an income tax was imposed of 3 per cent on all incomes, with a minimum exemption of $800, but no tax was collected under the law, and a new income tax was signed in 1862 with an exemption of $600. The amount produced by this tax was over $376,000,000. The Wilson Bill of 1894 provided for an Income Tax, but it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. An amendment to the Constitution threw out this objection, and it has made its appearance to-day under the auspices of democratic approval, with a very positive likelihood of staying, certainly as long as the custom receipts fail to meet the current expenses.

It is a stamp of national degradation; it is socialistic; it is minatory, it is the subversive of solidarity. It will prove a nuisance, for under any and all conditions as long as it remains a revenue furnished by a minority, practically impressed for its imposition, the majority will rejoice in this partial penalty for success, and the politicians will even

more boisterously and unanimously discover they need the money.

Already the fatal facility with which this elastic instrument for financial recuperation can be turned to account under new circumstances of restraint or deficiency, is illustrated in the present crisis. The cutting off of the imports by the European war-already so much diminished by the new customs-turns the eyes of our law-givers and officials to the necessity of raising the wind in some new way, or, as it may happen by preference—and already hinted at by utilizing the immeasurably expansive appliance of the Income Tax.

CHAPTER V

THE MEXICAN INTERVENTION

It is a remarkable and very complete illustration of the blindness of partisan devotion that the admirers of Mr. Wilson persistently extol his blunders as triumphs. It is natural and pardonable, but it is also the duty of less enthusiastic or interested observers to destroy the illusions these partisans create. There has been no one measure of the present administration more fraught with misjudgment, and unfairness, than the prolonged and bungling efforts to rearrange the affairs of Mexico in harmony with preconceived notions, and in defiance of precedent and an honorable neutrality. Mr. Wilson and the tirelessly insinuating Secretary of State have stubbornly refused to learn the situation from the men who have studied and probed it; they have been meddlesome and futile, denying to the wisdom of trained minds and the proper decorum of diplomacy their appropriate office, and, surrendering themselves to a factitious enmity, nurtured apparently in part through self-importance or self-love, delivered the nation's support to the most heinous brigands, under the sleek profession of disinterestedness in the cause of downtrodden humanity. Incidentally they have caused the unnecessary death of many noble young men, and incurred a great expense. They have really accomplished nothing, and yet with these humiliating results seem inclined to believe that they have been both great and successful.

Virile and intelligent procedure would have placed America in a position of deserved influence with the Mexican people, and insured the continuation of her progressing activities in the development of that rich country. The Sunday-school methods of Mr. Bryan and the belligerency of Mr. Wilson, a self-importance, have interfered. An astute policy, even though it involved some sacrifices to an abstract justice, would have proven immeasurably better. Mr. Wilson lives so much or assumes to live so much in the clouds of an aphoristic morality, that is not practical, that he actually brings about more miseries and precipitates more desolation in private and public fortunes than the less academic but adequate ways of men who probably are just as high-minded as himself, and far more efficient. Everything in the Mexican muddle has been misjudged, mismanaged, and deplorably perverted, while the spectacle of our country associated through its administrative chiefs with an abandoned highwayman, whose crimes of murder and outrage shock humanity-where humanity is not cloaked under the aspects of a sublimated altruism-is humiliatingly presented to the entire world.

Mr. Edward I. Bell has written a book of arresting brilliancy and emphasis which, however much at places it displays optimistic preference for the Maderos, and with whatever picturesque presentation it paints the pictures of the succeeding scenes of a sad tragedy, carries in its pages the sentiment of justice, and the marks of an extraordinary familiarity with men, events, and motives. Mr. Bell has the incisiveness of anger, and the romantic effectiveness of a journalistic style in its best phases. He does not exactly denounce people, but he makes them contemptible or obnoxious. But the tenor of the book, while superficially impeccable in its fairness, betrays preformed judg

ment and ́an unmistakable sympathy. Mr. Bell's book is entitled "The Political Shame of Mexico." It opens with the spectacle of gayety and profuse entertainment that marked the last days of Porphirio Diaz, "the thirty September days of bunting and glitter and military show, the thirty blazing nights of electrical effulgence, toned to tenderness in the seclusion of the patio and boudoir-the never-to-be-forgotten Centennial nights-floating away at last upon the river of time whose somber bosom they had brightened for a space"; it closes with the very last developments in the confusion which Mr. Wilson has precipitated, and in which, as we understand him, Mr. Bell believes serious mistakes, the result of inadequate knowledge, have been made. The author's words confirm the impression that Mr. Wilson has displaced reality with a dream.

He says, "the idea that ignorance plus liberty, plus providence is the formula for a commonwealth is no more respectable to-day than Rousseau's theories of a return to nature, and the golden age. And it will be well for the United States to consider, in all the long future of the Mexican question, that what is really desired is the welfare of the Mexican people, not their mere momentary gratification. The aspiration for liberty has often seemed to come from below, though its real source has usually been in a few elevated minds."

Mr. Wilson's policy may have been guided by presumably honorable motives, and by much prepossession and preconception on his part; it does not seem to have been guided by the best knowledge or by the surer instincts of statesmanship. Mr. Bell thinks President Wilson "saw Huerta for what he was, vicious, unreliable, treacherous, bespattered with the blood of his predecessor," but it is urged here, in the choice of at least one procedure, which