Taxation on Land. 
29 
free ; bat, even if it were so, it does not follow that it should be 
perpetually borne, as it now is, if injustice is shown to exist. 
At any rate, sanitary and education charges are too modern to 
have become inherited. 
In conclusion, I submit that the position and prospects of 
all landowners, farmers, and farm labourers, are affected to a 
serious extent by the operation of an unequal and unjust system 
of local and imperial taxation. It is difficult to conceive why 
personal property should have been permitted to throw off its 
share of the burden, as it has done ; and it is worthy of note 
that this came about just at the time (within a year or so) when 
the Corn Laws were repealed. At the moment, therefore, when 
the British farmer was divested of his weapon of protection, and 
told that he must meet the competition of the whole world un- 
aided, except by his own energy, skill, and powers of endurance, 
he was handicapped in the race by his friends at home, who 
weighted him heavily with the burdens that they removed from 
their own shoulders. If the agricultural classes, as a body, have 
not perceived that such was the case, the sooner they do so and 
seek relief from an unjust system the better it will be for them. 
The question was prominently and forcibly, in some of its aspects, 
put before the members of the Agricultural Conference held in 
London in December 1892 ; but it is a many-sided one, and re- 
quires to be put, again and again, through every possible chan- 
nel. The need for this is the greater because the principles of 
few subjects are so difficult to understand as those relating to 
taxation. Very little, comparatively, is known even of the ordi- 
nary rules for obtaining proper assessments under the laws as they 
now exist; and many just causes of appeal before Assessment 
Committees and Commissioners of Taxes are lost because they are 
not properly stated. As such is the case, there is an excuse for 
the general and fundamental principles of the same laws being 
imperfectly understood. But this defect must be remedied by 
giving publicity to the system ; as the true road to real progress 
and reform, such as is here needed, is through an awakening of 
the public conscience. 
Examination of Existing Assessments. 
In the meantime, while waiting for the benefit of some radical 
alteration in the present system, it will be well to make the best 
of the existing situation, and examine the assessments now per- 
taining. Rents have been lowered, remissions have been given, 
and the Assessment Committees of Boards of Guardians, particu- 
larly where they are dominated by prominent members repre- 
