CHAPTEE VI. 



THE POLITICAL ECONOMIST AND THE LAND. 



It may have struck the reader that when men Hke Dr. 

 Chamberlaine had begun to point out, for the benefit of their 

 countrymen, flaws in the incidence of taxation and other draw- 

 backs to the current systems of commerce and police, and to 

 base their objections on logical grounds, there was a new 

 departure in the relationship of the general public to the land. 

 In the argumentative writings of these pioneers of Political 

 Economy we find, and we naturally expect to find, a consider- 

 able amount of error. It was the age of pamphlets, every 

 one of which contained a queer mixture of truth and false- 

 hood. Thus Chamberlaine based his appeal for legislative 

 encouragement to tillage, not on any grounds connected with 

 the public welfare as a whole, but simply for the special 

 advantages that would accrue therefrom to the War Office. 

 Most of the earlier economists approached the new subject 

 from some particular standpoint of their own. The time 

 when payments were made principally in kind was as yet 

 not so remote that writers could have forgotten some of the 

 advantages of the system. Thus, under the custom of pay- 

 ing all taxes in money, Sir William Petty points out ^ the 

 following anomaly : " When the king has occasion to victual 

 his ships at Portsmouth, farmers must carry their corn and 

 drive their fat cattle to distant markets, in order to pay out 

 of the profits thus derived, the very monies which would 

 afterwards be reconverted by the king into corn and beef 

 for the fleet." " Moreover," adds this author, " the farmer for 

 haste is forced to undersell his corn, and the king likewise for 



* A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, etc., 1679. 



110 



