THE TAXATION OF VIRTUE.
"I shall wait," said Peter, "till they send me the final notice."
"Being his wife," said Hilda to me, "I am in a position to know that he will not. In another week he will pay, saying that the thought of income-tax has affected his nerves and that he can bear it no longer. He wobbles like this for six weeks twice a year, and meanwhile his family starves."
"Under our system of taxation," Peter retorted, "the innocent must suffer."
"It falls alike on the just and the unjust," I interposed. "How else would you have it?"
"Naturally I would have it fall on the unjust alone," he replied.
"Why not on the just alone?" I asked, suddenly aware of the birth of an idea.
"Of course you want exemption."
"You miss my point. You grant that taxation is necessary?"
"For the sake of argument," said Peter, "I grant that, with reservations."
"Since then there must be taxes, why not have taxes that it would be a pleasure to pay? The current taxes are not a pleasure to pay."
"I grant that," said Peter, "without reservations."
"Now there is only one sort of tax that I can imagine anybody paying gladly, and that would be a tax on his virtues."
"Still hankering after your own exemption," growled Peter.
"Leave me out of account. Take, by preference, yourself. You have virtues and are proud of them."
Hilda intervened, as I had anticipated. "The pride is admitted," said she, "but as for the assessment value of the virtues——"
"Never mind that. You are proud of your virtues"—I turned to Peter again—"yet you are sometimes troubled, like the rest of us, by a fear that you may not really possess them after all. But the assessment of your virtues by the Board of Inland Revenue would prove their existence to yourself and to all the world."
"Except his wife," said Hilda.
"Her evidence would not be accepted. If you had paid taxation for the possession of a virtue, the receipt would be a guarantee that you did possess that particular virtue, and it would consequently be a source of profound moral satisfaction to you. You would pay with pleasure. Besides, it is a poor kind of virtue that will not abide a test. The tax would be a test. Suppose that five pounds was levied upon you for honesty. If you refused to pay how could you ever again claim to be honest? You would be marked as not valuing your honesty at five pounds. No, you would pay and pay readily."
My words were addressed to Peter, but Hilda seemed the more interested. "It sounds well, but how would you raise the money?" she asked.
"That would depend on the virtue," I replied. "The sobriety tax, for example, would be levied on anyone who had not for some years been convicted of drunkenness."
"But how about the virtues that you don't get fined for not having—truthfulness, unselfishness, kindheartedness and all those?"
"I admit that would be difficult. Can you suggest anything?" I asked Peter.
"No," he answered. "I'm not encouraging your rotten idea anyhow."
"Could the revenue officials feel people's bumps?" inquired Hilda reflectively.
"I'm afraid," I said, "people wouldn't stand it. Fancy Peter——"
"I've got it," said Hilda. "The revenue officials would attribute a virtue to the taxpayer, and if he wanted to escape taxation they would require him to prove to them that he lacked the virtue in question."
"They would like doing that," muttered Peter.
"You have found the solution," I said to Hilda. "If you impute to a person a virtue he does not possess he probably denies that he has it, but he is really flattered and his denial is not sincere. He would be willing to pay on it; he would rather pay than not."
At this point Peter grew tired of refraining from comment. "I don't want you to suppose," he said, "that I am taking any interest in your fatuous scheme, but doesn't it occur to you that under your system it would be simply ruinous to have any virtues at all, and that the only people who would flourish would be those who had no virtues and were not ashamed of it?"
"For one thing," I replied confidently, "the taxes would be graduated in the ordinary way in accordance with means. The slightest flicker of a conscience in Park Lane would be more heavily mulcted than the most blameless life in Bermondsey. But the main point is that under my system taxation would become the measure of a man's moral worth, and people who did not pay taxes would be simply out of it. All the plums would go the highly-taxed men. Their tax receipts would be certificates of character, and the more they earned the more the Treasury would be able to get out of them. So far from dodging taxation, people would scramble to pay it."
"But how," asked Hilda, "would you make the tax receipt a trustworthy testimonial? Your rich man with one virtue would have a better receipt than your poor one with ten."
"The virtues taxed would be shown on the receipt," I replied. "Besides, poor and virtuous men would, as I have suggested, get an abatement on their virtue taxes, and the amount of the abatement would be shown on the receipt. So it could easily be seen what proportion a man was paying on his wealth and what on his virtues."
"Look here," said Peter, aroused at last, "do you convey that the tobacco duty would be paid by people who didn't smoke?"
"It would amount to that," I answered, "assuming that abstention from tobacco were counted a virtue."
"There may be something in it after all," said Peter.
Fisherman. "There are plenty of fish, but you've got to fish dry to catch them."
American Friend. "Say, you make me real homesick."
NEW RHYMES FOR OLD CHILDREN.
The Chameleon.
The chameleon changes his colour;
He can look like a tree or a wall;
He is timid and shy and he hates to be seen,
So he simply sits down in the grass and goes green,
And pretends he is nothing at all.
I wish I could change my complexion
To purple or orange or red;
I wish I could look like the arm of a chair
So nobody ever would know I was there
When they wanted to put me to bed.
I wish I could be a chameleon
And look like a lily or rose;
I'd lie on the apples and peaches and pears,
But not on Aunt Margaret's yellowy chairs—
I should have to be careful of those.
The chameleon's life is confusing;
He is used to adventure and pain;
But if ever he sat on Aunt Maggie's cretonne
And found what a curious colour he'd gone,
I don't think he'd do it again.
A.P.H.