A graduated or progressive tax is necessarily arbitrary, for there is no definite rule or principle to apply to the scale. The rate, reasonable at first, may ultimately become confiscatory. There is nothing to check or stop the ascending scale. One act of injustice will lead to another. The appetite will grow and produce fresh injustice. If a tax of twenty-five per cent. on large fortunes now seems to some but a moderate beginning, where will the tax stop, and who is to determine what is or is not reasonable and beyond what point a legislative body shall not go? A few advocates of progressive taxation have already suggested fifty per cent. as a maximum applicable to the so-called surplus of large fortunes, but others more radical and less responsible may readily advocate a tax of one hundred per cent. upon the surplus they regard as superfluous or unhealthful. There is, indeed, no limit to the possible ascent in the scale of progression, and no power to prevent abuse and oppression on the part of temporary and irresponsible majorities. The rich would then be completely at the mercy of mere numbers. During the French Revolution, the experiment was tried under the name of compulsory loans. These loans finally absorbed fifty per cent. of such incomes as the majority of the legislative assembly saw fit to consider as _abondants_, and one hundred per cent. of all incomes which they thought were _superflus_. The late W.E.H. Lecky, one of the most eminent historians of our day, wrote as follows of progressive taxation in his work on "Democracy and Liberty": "When the principle of taxing all fortunes on the same rate of computation is abandoned, no definite rule or principle remains. At what point the higher scale is to begin, or to what degree it is to be raised, depends wholly on the policy of governments and the balance of parties. The ascending scale may at first be very moderate, but it may at any time, when fresh taxes are required, be made more severe, till it reaches or approaches the point of confiscation. No fixed line or amount of graduation can be maintained upon principle, or with any chance of finality. The whole matter will depend upon the interests and wishes of the electors; upon party politicians seeking for a cry and competing for the votes of very poor and very ignorant men. Under such a system all large properties may easily be made unsafe, and an insecurity may arise which will be fatal to all great financial undertakings. The most serious restraint on parliamentary extravagance will, at the same time, be taken away, and majorities will be invested with the easiest and most powerful instrument of oppression. Highly graduated taxation realizes most completely the supreme danger of democracy, creating a state of things in which one class imposes on another burdens which it is not asked to share, and impels the state into vast schemes of extravagance, under the belief that the whole cost will be thrown upon others."