On the Source of Saving and the Taxation of Normal Income as an Approximation of the Exclusion of Income from the Tax Base

While I was meditating, with great delight, as happens with good books, on the pages of De Viti’s Principii and trying to follow with my mind the transmutations of capital goods into direct goods and the consequent tax vicissitudes, I happened to read, in the hours in which the mind loves to rest, one of the most pleasing and deservedly successful novels from the other side of the Atlantic, Maria Chapdelaine, by a writer, unknown yesterday but famous today, Louis Hémon, who died young before the glory of his one book could be obscured by those that would perhaps have followed.1 It is the powerful poem of the pioneer in French Canada, the revelation of why a handful of men, no more than 80,000, abandoned by their mother country in 1763, should have multiplied (to about 2,750,000 in Canada alone, without counting the numerous offshoots in the United States), populated provinces and now become the most prolific, compact, traditional and lively people of North America. Reading that book, one feels the deep-rooted reasons that move men to conquer the earth, that produce families, and great and lasting races. One also sees clearly, and that is why I remember the book, the phenomena of labour, wages, profit and saving not obscured by monetary superstructures or verbal conventions. The land stretches out vast, without limits, before the eyes of the pioneer, but covered with firs, pines, scrubs and bushes of every kind, without roads, but crossed by rivers and buried for seven months of the year under a thick blanket of snow and ice.