406= 140 Taxation as affecting the Agricultural Interest. 
supply for their Majesties occasions may be raised by a charge 
upon all lands, tenements, and hereditaments, 6:c., be it enacted 
that all manors, messuages, lands and tenements, and all quar- 
ries, mines, tithes, tolls, 6cc., and all hereditaments, of what- 
soever nature they be, shall be charged with the sum of four 
shillings for every twenty shillings of the full yearly value." 
Although minute rules were laid down for the " better dis- 
covery of personal estates," and although these reappeared in the 
Acts of 1697, fixing the quota to be levied, and even in 1797, 
a century later, these efforts seem practically to have failed, 
and while the share of the tax on land was retained, personal^ 
estates were, in 1833, formally exempted. When, either acci-' 
dentally or through carelessness in the more difficult task of, 
local assessment, the produce of personal estate under the Land 
Tax Act had been reduced to nearly nothing, !Mr. Pitt, in 1798, 
made the burden perpetual at the quotas for each district fixed 
on the valuation oi the previous century. He gave at the same 
time a power of redemption, which was so largely acted upon, 
that in that year and the next 436,000/., or more than one- 
fourth of the tax, was finally redeemed. Since that date redemp 
tion has proceeded more slowly, the total thus wiped out bein^ 
now 826,000/. 
The amount levied as land-tax in Great Britain (for Irelam 
is exempt) is now 1,100,000/., and I have taken three-fourths o 
this as actually falling on land rather than houses, that bein 
something: like the ratio which held jrood between these section 
of real property, when the tax was stereotyped at the beginning o 
this century. 
The distribution of the tax is of the most curiouslv irregula 
character. \ot only is there great discrepancy between th 
relative values of different districts now and in the seventeent 
century, but other strangely disturbing features attended th 
earlier assessment when the local returns are said to have varia 
in their magnitude according to the loyalty of particular area 
to the reigning Sovereign. This may partly explain the ver 
light quota paid by Scotland. By far the heavier weight fall 
on the agricultural counties. A few years ago the rate of charg 
in Bedford, Berkshire, or Wilts exceeded 3 per cent., while i 
the populous areas of Lancashire, Durham, or Yorkshire it fe 
below 1 per cent., and in individual instances the anomalies i 
its incidence are very much more glaring. It must not be ovci, 
looked that, although the 825,000/. I have allotted to land proptM§ 
may be tlie measure of the special payment exacted yearly, th 
landowners might in fairness claim to have added to the burde 
thus imposed a similar share (three-fourths) of the annual valu 
of the land-tax redeemed. To effect this redemption, capital h 
