530 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



more complicated. Two valuations of the same property may be 

 made for raising imperial taxes namely, one for the income tax, 

 and one for the land tax. Three valuations of the same property 

 may be made for raising local rates namely, one for the poor rate, 

 one for the county rate, and one for the borough rate. Here, then, 

 are five different valuations in activity. 



Of these the parish was the first and most important division, 

 having been introduced in the sixteenth century, when the disso- 

 lution of the monasteries had raised the question of poor relief. 

 It was adopted for convenience, as the contributions were at first 

 entirely voluntary; but as the problem of the poor increased in 

 importance, compulsion was applied, and at the beginning of the 

 seventeenth century, by the acts of Elizabeth of 1597 and 1601, com- 

 pulsion was fully established and the parish adopted as the area for 

 levying rates for the relief of its poor. It now became necessary 

 to define more specifically the persons liable for this rate, but the 

 law framed no system by which assessments were to be made or 

 rates collected. A distinction was made between the occupier of 

 certain properties (such as lands, houses, coal mines, or salable 

 underwoods) and an inhabitant of the parish. The occupier was to 

 be taxed upon the basis of the annual benefit arising from the prop- 

 erty situated in the parish; but the inhabitant was taxed not in re- 

 spect to any specified subjects, implying an intention to tax them 

 upon some other basis. This raised the question of " ability," and 

 how that question was to be determined. The act said nothing that 

 could point to personal property, " and it was only on the ground 

 of his being an inhabitant that any owner of personal property could 

 be rated for that property, because there was no word in that statute 

 to include him, except the word inhabitant. Under that statute, 

 therefore, there was necessarily a distinction between residents and 

 nonresidents, because the resident would be ratable for his person- 

 alty within the place, the nonresident not. The distinction, how- 

 ever, under that statute applied only to those kinds of property 

 which the statute did not specify, for the occupier of lands, houses, 

 etc., and whatever the statute enumerated, was ratable whether he 

 were resident or not." * And when the judge of assize was asked 

 to give an opinion he decided that lands should be taxed equally and 

 indifferently, but an additional tax could be laid on the " personal 

 visible ability " of the parishioner. Further, " all things which are 

 real, and a yearly revenue must be taxed to the poor." Yet there 

 were limitations on this apparently wide interpretation, and as early 

 as 1633 it was only visible properties, both real and personal, of the 

 inhabitants within the parish, and only within the parish, that could 



* Abbott (Chief Justice) in R. vs. The Hull Dock Company, 3 B and C, p. 525. 



