4. Every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible over and above what it brings into the public treasury. Axiomatic as these rules appear to us, in Adam Smith’s day they were new and startling: they had never been formulated or practised in any country. Smith was “the first that ever burst” upon the silent sea of taxation. He put into the hands of statesmen, who had hitherto been groping and blundering in the dark, a perfect touchstone by which to test projects old and new of raising revenue. The idea of considering the taxpayer was itself a novelty. It is true that the criterion of ability had been adopted in the Elizabethan poor-rate, but there was no other trace of it in the fiscal system of Great Britain, which was on the whole, even at that time, the best in Europe. Smith treated taxation as one of the causes that impede the progress of wealth. It is characteristic of the man that he does not regard any tax, even the land-tax, as good in itself, but only praises it comparatively as a lesser evil. Burke himself was not a more consistent or persistent preacher of economy. Not that Smith was jealous of expenditure on roads and communication, public instruction, and other services which were plainly beneficial to the whole society, and could not be left to private enterprise. He has no pedantic objection to the State managing a business that it is capable of managing well. He mentions without disapproval that the republic of Hamburg makes money out of a lombard,[30] a wine cellar, and an apothecary’s shop. But the post-office “is perhaps the only mercantile project which has been successfully managed by every sort of Government.” Of all taxes he most dislikes taxes upon the necessaries of life. Yet he does not deny that if, after all the proper sources of taxation have been exhausted, revenue is still required, “improper” taxes must be imposed. To preserve their land from the sea, and their republic from its enemies, the Dutch had had recourse to very objectionable taxes, and he does not blame them if they could in no other way maintain that republican form of government, which he regards as “the principal support of the present grandeur of Holland.” But he makes it very plain indeed in his last, and perhaps his greatest, chapter “Of Public Debts,” that the miseries and embarrassments of Europe are due in the main to profligate expenditure of all kinds, and especially to the immense sums wasted on wars that ought to have been avoided.