How times change

From the introduction to the second edition of Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution, 1872:

Some part of the difference between England and America arises
undoubtedly not from political causes but from economical. America
is not a country sensitive to taxes; no great country has perhaps
ever been so unsensitive in this respect; certainly she is far less
sensitive than England. In reality America is too rich; daily
industry there is too common, too skilful, and too productive, for
her to care much for fiscal burdens. She is applying all the
resources of science and skill and trained labour, which have been
in long ages painfully acquired in old countries, to develop with
great speed the richest soil and the richest mines of new countries;
and the result is untold wealth. Even under a Parliamentary
government such a community could and would bear taxation much more
easily than Englishmen ever would.

Bagehot thought that the United States was happy with a government enjoying vast surplus revenues, where the United Kingdom (or, as he called it, 'England') would force, and had forced, government to use it to abolish income tax and lower other duties, intolerant of the potential for what modern political discourse likes to call 'big government', a fear absent, he believed, in the United States, though it was a discipline he thought they should learn for the good of their future economic development.