Although the first years under an efficient form of national control were remarkably successful, inspiring what was really the first confidence in the free government of America, it was not to be expected that all difficulties were to be avoided, especially if the new form assumed a vigorous and capable management. Heretofore domestic violence had threatened local government only, because the national administration was too inefficient to come in contact with disorder. If the National Government should now attempt to enforce its laws, the very action must sooner or later bring it into conflict with recalcitrants in some section, as well as with the naturally lawless. Even the understanding that local policing was to be left to local government would not restrain an efficient national administration from meeting such a crisis vigorously. Indeed, the action of the nation in such an emergency would determine whether it was at the mercy of State aid and protection or whether it could care for itself. If one were attempting to predict at what point of national administration rebellion would arise, he would no doubt choose taxation. The hostility of the people toward taxation, possibly engendered in the Revolutionary days, and exaggerated by human nature, has been described in previous pages. One of the objections to the Constitution had been that the people could now be taxed by two agencies, State and nation, thereby involving double taxes. The resistance to the excise tax, which began to be manifest in a small way soon after its institution in 1791, bore a striking resemblance to the rebellion against the stamp-tax levied by Britain upon the colonists a generation before. A tax levied on imported goods, collected at the ports, quietly added to the original cost, and, therefore, a kind of external tax, is never so objectionable as one paid directly out of hand, and hence an internal tax. So little in evidence is an external tax that the people are sometimes beguiled into questioning whether the producer or the consumer pays the tax. An internal tax, levied on distilled liquors, whiskey, rum, brandy, and gin, was no more a novelty in the early days of the Constitution than was a stamp-tax in 1765. Being accustomed to having it levied by the local government in each instance, it became objectionable when laid by the superior power. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania had used an excise as a means of raising revenue. The people in the western part of the latter State had several times resisted its imposition by the State Legislature, but the penalties imposed upon their lawlessness had generally been remitted by the governor, and the law had been finally repealed. "The Legislature has been obliged to wink at the violation of her excise laws in the western parts of the state ever since the Revolution," confessed a United States Senator from that State.