CHAPTER VIII. 



THE LAND TAXATION AND THE ECONOMISTS. 



By having thus examined generally the phases of philosophical 

 thought through which the earlier economists passed, we have 

 placed ourselves in a position to appreciate the worth of and 

 detect the errors in a national fiscal system which weighed so 

 heavily on the land, 



Locke had asserted, " It is in vain in a country whose 

 great fund is land to hope to lay the public charge of the 

 Government in anything else, there at last it will terminate. 

 The merchant (do what you can) will not bear it, the labourer 

 cannot, and therefore the landholder must," There was no jus- 

 tice in such an opportunist form of argument, and he was more 

 logical when he contended for the same ends in the following 

 words : " The landholder is more concerned in trade, and 

 ought to take a greater care that it be well managed, than even 

 the merchant himself; for he will certainly find that when a 

 decay has carried away one part of our money out of the king- 

 dom, and the other kept in the merchant's or tradesman's 

 hands, that no laws he can make, nor any little arts of shifting 

 property among ourselves, will bring it back to him again, but 

 his rents will fall and his income every day lessen, till general 

 industry and frugality joined to a well ordered trade shall 

 restore to the kingdom the riches and wealth it had formerly." 

 " Land and trade are twins," says another authority, " which 

 always wax and wane together ; so that it cannot be ill with 

 trade but land will fall, nor ill with land but trade will feel 

 it." 1 



Now the first suggestion of Locke's, instanced above, pro- 



* A Neiv Discourse of Trade, 1690. Preface, Sir Jos. Child. 



158 



