The Cost of European Governments.
A recent British Parliamentary report gives a comparative statement of the revenues of several European States, from which it appears that Austria (not including Hungary) has direct taxes £7,762,553; indirect ones of £21,406,978, and miscellaneous ones of £4,726,447, or a total tax of £33,895,979 (about $167,429,500) for a population of 22,132,684 souls, which is more than $7 for each man, woman, or child. Hungarians are somewhat better off, the total taxes being £19,965,263 (about $99,826,000) and the population 15,608,723—say $6.50 per person. But the Austrians and Hungarians are taxed much less heavily than their neighbors in Prussia, where the total is £56,421,875, and the population 27,251,000, showing an average of about $10 per person. The French are still worse off. The totals for them are £107,303,975 of taxes and 36,905,788 of population, or about $15 of tax per head. This for the people of Belgium, a neutral country, free from wars and Nihilism, nearly equals their showing, being taxes £14,911,502, and population 5,476,000. Better off than any of these people are the Russians—or apparently so, one should say, for the burden of a tax lies not so much in the amount of it as in the inability to pay it. The Russians pay £60,362,731 in taxes, several millions more, that is, than the Austria-Hungary people, or the Germans and Poles of Prussia, but they outnumber their neighbors by tens of millions—the Russians by 45,000,000, the Austria-Hungary races by 15,000,000. For these $300,000,000 of Russian taxes there are 72,692,000 people among whom to divide them. Thus every European Russian pays a tax of $4, while every Frenchman pays some $15, and yet Russia is internally the most disturbed great country in Europe, and France the most peaceful.—Scientific American.