The Land Taxation and the Economists. 183 



any class might have been expected to resent the new impost, 

 it was surely the proprietors of realty, whose incomes had, in 

 1692, been already charged with a property tax ; but they 

 only seemed to see in it a fresh departure from a fiscal policy 

 which had hitherto looked chiefly to the land for funds. On 

 the other hand, the commercial interest gladly submitted to a 

 proposal likely to bring to a close a struggle which promised 

 to become grievously pernicious to trade. 



The same unfairness of incidence, and the same dangers to 

 the Landed Interest, in a more or less degree accompanied the 

 discussion and imposition of this fresh impost as had accom- 

 panied all previous efforts to institute a property tax. The 

 principle of gradual rise had been admitted by the proposed 

 imposition of a progressive scale of payments on incomes 

 between £60 and £200. Why, asked some of the English 

 Jacobins outside Parliament, was not this principle pursued 

 through all the higher classes of income ? It is hardl}^ neces- 

 sary to point out that such a course would have tended to 

 equalise, not so much men's fiscal dues as their incomes, and 

 that communistic doctrines such as this were not within the 

 range of practical politics amidst an assembly entirely com- 

 posed of men of fortune. 



A far more plausible objection, and one equally dangerous 

 to the rights of landed property, was that which would have 

 made a difference in the various kinds of income. It was the 

 more formidable because it was fought out on the equitable 

 grounds of Smith's famous canons. An annuity for life is 

 worth say ten years' purchase, an estate in fee simple triple 

 that amount ; why should not the latter pay three times as 

 much as the former ? Had the tax been of a permanent de- 

 scription, an easy defence could have been set up by the 

 representatives of the permanent income. For if two indi- 

 viduals, possessed of the same capital, elected to invest it, the 

 one in the funds, the other in an annuity, so as to realise, the 

 former at a small, the latter at a large percentage, the incomes 

 respectively of £500 and £250, — and if the rate of a permanent 

 income tax had been differentiated, so that the annuitant paid 

 less per cent, per annum on his temporary income than the 



