“Taxes upon every article which enters into the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under the foot; taxes upon everything which it is pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste; taxes upon warmth, light, and locomotion; taxes on everything on earth and the waters under the earth, on everything that comes from abroad or is grown at home; taxes on the raw material; taxes on every fresh value that is added to it by the industry of man; taxes on the sauce which pampers man’s appetite, and the drug that restores him to health,--on the ermine which decorates the judge, and the rope which hangs the criminal,--on the poor man’s salt, and the rich man’s spice,--on the brass nails of the coffin, and the ribbons of the bride,--at bed or board, couchant or levant,--we must pay. The school-boy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine which has paid seven per cent into a spoon that has paid fifteen per cent, flings himself back upon his chintz bed which has paid twenty-two per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death. His whole property is then immediately taxed from two to ten per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel; his virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble; and he is then gathered to his fathers, to be taxed no more.”[345] A passage so exquisite in wit and language is seasonable here, especially when considering what shall be taxed; but I ask you to bear in mind that the English tax-gatherer never laid his hand on a book. Everything else he might touch,--a book never. And yet in our country it is proposed to tax books. This is the land of public schools, where you boast that education, like justice, is free to all at the common cost. But a tax on books is in direct conflict with this beautiful principle. Every argument for free schools pleads also for free books,--at least for freedom from taxation. It will be a curious inconsistency to rear the school-house, often costly, where every child is welcomed without charge, and then compel him to pay a tax of eight per cent on every book he carries in his satchel. There is one term which fitly characterizes this tax. It is a term adopted abroad, but more justly applicable to a tax on books than to any other tax: I mean _a tax on knowledge_. Such is the tax now proposed. And this tax, which cannot be named without awakening just condemnation, you are asked to make an American institution. After long struggle in England, the various _taxes on knowledge_ are abandoned. I hope that our country, representative and defender of liberal ideas, will not commence a system which modern civilization has disowned. I ask for the yeas and nays.