taxes cannot be properly granted, and should be 
abolished where it exists; sufficient indemnifi- 
cation being provided for those who suffer by the 
measure. These exemptions had their origin in 
atime of limited views. 
As to the exemption from taxes of particular 
kinds of property, the most remarkable is that 
which is granted to certain landed estates. This 
privilege is usually justified by the following 
reasons: 1. that one estate has undertaken to 
pay the tax of another. In this way the nobility 
have often endeavoured to defend the exemption 
of their estates, by pretending that their ances- 
tors had ceded part of their lands to the peasants, 
on condition that the latter, in addition to some 
labour on the lord’s estate, should pay the taxes 
of the same, from the produce of their farms. 
Such a contract might have been legally made, 
and might stand good if it had been concluded 
for a fixed proportion of taxes, and the agreement 
could be clearly proved; but no compact can be 
acknowledged as binding, by which one side 
undertakes to relieve the other from the burden 
of all future taxes, since no one can know what 
their amount may become, and whether the land 
granted would be a proper equivalent; for, in 
every contract, the nature of the obligation 
should be definite. But in addition to the fact 
that such contracts are mere fictions, the state 
should allow them no validity, because they give 
406 TAXES. 
said, that a personal right to exemption from 
to taxes the appearance of an ignominious bur- 
den—an idea which no government: should fa- 
vour. 2%. Governments have sometimes allowed 
individuals, and even whole nations, to redeem 
themselves from a certain tax, for a gross sum ; 
as, for instance, in England, in the case of the 
land tax. Such contracts must be kept; but no 
individual, still less a whole class or nation, can 
purchase an entire exemption from taxes, because 
the amount of future taxes cannot be estimated, 
and, consequently, their value cannot be settled. 
This would be to sell the very means of the state’s 
existence. To sell an improper tax in order to 
establish a better, as was done with the land tax 
in England, may be advisable, and certain objects 
may thus for a time be exempted from taxes; 
but this is no reason for releasing the income 
| which they afford, for all future times, from taxes. 
3. Finally, the privilege of exemption never can 
be considered as absolutely irrevocable, but is 
subject to be judged on the general principle of 
utility, like all other positive laws and institu- 
tions; and if found inapplicable, injurious, and 
oppressive to other classes of citizens, such laws 
must be amended or abolished. And as the state 
ought never to persist in old errors at the ex- 
pense of its citizens, so; on the other hand, those 
who are to lose the privilege of exemption from 
taxes, should be indemnified for it according to 
equitable principles, 
TAXODIUM. See Scuuserrta. 
-TAXUS. See Yew-Trer. 
TEA. 
TAZETTA. See Narcissus. 
THA,—botanically Thea. A genus of economi- 
cal, evergreen shrubs, of the camellia order. The 
plants of it furnish most of the well-known tea 
of commerce; but are the subjects of great un- 
certainty as to their specific characters and ar- 
rangement. Two kinds, the black and the green, 
Thea bohea and Thea viridis, both white-flowered 
and commonly from 4 to 6 feet high, the former 
blooming from August till December, and the 
latter from February till November, were intro- 
duced from China to the greenhouses and con- 
servatories of Britain in 1768; and they are re- 
garded by some botanists as two distinct species, 
by others as only varieties of one species, and by 
many persons as mere specimens of a considerable 
number of different forms into which one wild 
plant has been wrought by very long and assidu- 
ous cultivation. ‘The Chinese themselves, even 
including most or all of them who take part in 
tea cultivation, probably could not come to any 
harmony of opinion respecting the specific cha- 
racters of the varieties; for they call the wild 
kind which grows on the mountains of Ho-nan 
tchow-tcha or bastard tea, and designate any 
variety which yields the largest and best produce 
for the market the true tea; and were they to 
study botany and plant-culture after the Euro- 
pean style, they would very likely pronounce 
their cultivated tea-plants to stand related to 
their wild tea-plant in nearly the same way as 
our orchard apple-trees do to our wild crab, or 
as our cultivated cabbages and coleworts and 
borecoles and cauliflowers do to our wild cabbage. 
In their practice of preparing different kinds and 
qualities of tea for the market, too, they are de- 
pendent far less on different varieties of plant, 
than on different stages of growth, different sea- 
sons of the year, and different methods of drying 
and flavouring ; and they manufacture black tea 
and green tea, not from the leaves of two spe- 
cies or two varieties corresponding to the Thea 
bohea and the Thea viridis of our greenhouses, but | 
from different growths or kinds of the leaves of 
one plant, or by different methods of drying even 
the same growth of leaves. 
The stem of the tea-plant is somewhat el of 
an ashy colour in the lower parts, and more red- 
dish toward the top; the branches are alternate, 
yet shoot out irregularly ; the leaves are elliptic, 
indented at the top, entire near the base, smooth, 
firm, glossy, shining, and of a bright green co- 
lour; the buds are enclosed in a husk, which 
drops off; the flowers come out singly from the 
axils of the leaves, and have a small calyx, gene- 
rally six white round petals, and upwards of two 
hundred stamens; the capsules have three round 
cells, opening longitudinally on only one side; 
and the seeds are single, globose, and about the 
size of filberts, and have an oily and disagreeably 
bitter kernel. The leaves in their fresh or unpre- 
pared state are said to possess an intoxicating 
property ; but they lose it on being exposed to | 
