The Land Taxation and the Economists. 169 



reverse, was included. Pictures and jewelry were valued, and 

 the interest on their supposed worth charged at the rate of 

 4s. in the pound. The tax could not be termed an income 

 tax, because the charge was not levied on the yearly receipts 

 from mercantile capital, but from the estimated interest of £6 

 per cent., which it was supposed that each individual's capital 

 ought to return. But, according to our mercantilist pamph- 

 leteers, this was an infringement of the sacred rights of per- 

 sonalty, and calculated to encourage unscrupulous Commission- 

 ers to proceed further in the same direction. They might, 

 however, have spared themselves this anxiety ; for even if we 

 choose to impute to the Commissioners the most sinister de- 

 signs on personalty, at any rate the Interest thus threatened 

 managed to evade its liabilities in the same successful manner 

 as it did those of personal tithes in Saxon days, or of pauper 

 relief in Tudor times. Thus we shall find that when there 

 ensued a struggle for political supremacy between the landed 

 and commercial interests of this country, terminating in the 

 ultimate triumph of the latter, personalty became entirely 

 freed from all liabilities under the tax of 1692.^ 



Even at an early period of the new law, personalty, accord- 

 ing to the evidence of so impartial a chronicler as Adam Smith, 

 was rated at hardly one-fiftieth part of its actual value, while 

 land was rated at fully one-half ;^ and when the original payers 

 of this property tax died, none save landlords seem to have 

 been forthcoming to undertake their fiscal liabilities. In due 

 course, therefore, the property tax resolved itself into a real 

 property or land tax, and took up a position alongside the 

 tithe charge and poor rate. Moreover, when about a hundred 

 years later a fresh property tax was enacted,^ the Landed 

 Interest was charged a second time, just as it had been for 

 pauper relief by the Poor Laws of Queen Elizabeth. 



There was yet one other cause for popular dislike to this 

 tax. The qualification for an individual to act as a Comniis- 



' 3 and 4 Will. IV. c. 12 repeals so much of 3 Will. IV c. 3 (which 

 prolonged 38 Geo. HI. c. 60 and 38 Geo. III. c. 5) as imposed the Land 

 Tax on personalty. 



-■ WeMth of Nations, Bk. V. ch. ii. p. 298, Ed. 1809. 



* The Income Tax Act of 1799. 



