- The cost and difficulty of verifying the fact that the article is exactly what it professes to be.
This is in some cases very small; but in many instances it is scarcely possible for the purchaser to verify the genuineness of certain articles. In these cases the public pay a larger price than they otherwise would do to those tradesmen whose character and integrity are well established.
Principles of Taxation.
In a pamphlet printed in 1848, I published my views of taxation, especially with reference to an Income Tax.
The principle there supported was entertained and examined by the French Minister of Finance, M. Passy. The pamphlet itself was subsequently translated into Italian and published at Turin, under the auspices of the Sardinian Finance Minister. {438}
〈THE PRINCIPLE OF REPRESENTATION.〉
The principle there maintained admits, I think, of an extension to the election of representatives.
In that case, each person would have one vote on the ground of his personality, and other votes in proportion to his income. Whenever any further extension of our representative system becomes necessary, the dangers arising from the extension of the personal suffrage may fairly be counterbalanced by giving a plurality of votes to property. Such a course would have a powerful tendency to good, by supporting the national credit and by preventing the destructive waste of capital by war, and it might even make us a highly conservative people.
As the subject of political economy will be considered rather dry by most readers, I will endeavour to enliven it by an extract from that pamphlet, which singularly illustrates the question of direct and indirect taxation. I had mentioned the productive pump of my Italian friend to the late Lord Lansdowne, who supplied me with the counterpart in the unproductive pump erected by the late William Edgeworth, at Edgeworth Town, in Ireland.
That proprietor, whose country residence was much frequented by beggars, resolved to establish a test for discriminating between the idle and the industrious, and also to obtain some small return for the alms he was in the habit of bestowing. He accordingly added to the pump by which the upper part of his house was supplied with water, a piece of mechanism so contrived that, at the end of a certain number of strokes of the pump-handle, a penny fell out from an aperture to repay the labourer for his work. This was so arranged, that labourers who continued at the work, obtained very nearly the usual daily wages of labour in that part of the country. The idlest of the vagabonds of course refused this new labour test: but the greater part of the beggars, whose {439} constant tale was that ‘they could not earn a fair day’s wages for a fair days work,’ after earning a few pence, usually went away cursing the hardness of their taskmaster.