"Oh, it is all but too true!" said Lady Arden, feelingly. "I do think your scheme of taxation would be but justice. Willoughby would certainly have a great deal to pay; but he can surely afford it better than poor creatures who have nothing but what they earn, or what they beg. I see the subject now in quite a new light. I have always been in the habit of thinking people poor who had but one or two thousands a-year; and I never took the trouble of considering that there was any difference between hundreds a-year and nothing."
"How would you apportion this property-tax of yours?" asked Lord Darlingford; "and how ensure its being sufficient for the exigencies of the state?"
"On a graduated scale, as I have already said," replied Henry, "from justice to individuals: let those who have the largest property to ensure, pay, as at all other insurance offices, the most; but, as to details and calculations, I leave those to Mr. Hume, or some of the multiplication table people; I only advocate the principle. Indeed, one of the great recommendations of this plan is, that the principle once established, the work is done: when those who tie up the burdens have to carry them, they may be trusted to find scales of sufficient nicety in which to weigh them: we need, in that case, no longer call for estimates, or petition against sinecures; nay, we may give the very voting of the subsidies to the Lords themselves!—many of whom, I make no doubt, would forthwith become immortalised by the economical or 'twopenny halfpenny' ingenuity, developed in the devising of future budgets. 'Twopence halfpenny,' I would have the noble lords to know, though no object to them, is a sum which many of their destitute fellow-creatures would, at this moment, receive with joy of heart! Then, remember, in further recommendation of this scheme, the millions a-year of unprofitable expense that would be saved to the nation, by having but one instead of innumerable taxes to levy."
"I don't think," said Sir James, looking as if he had made a discovery, "that the people with large fortunes will like this law of yours, Henry."
"Many people, too," replied Henry, contemptuously, "don't like paying their Christmas bills."
Alfred, who had been looking over a morning paper near a window, and from time to time lending a share of his attention to the disputants, now joined them.
"We cannot, I think," he said, "blame any particular government, or set of men, for the ills of which you complain. The fault is in human nature; and the remedy, if there be one, is only to be found in laying step by step the wisest general restrictions we can on individual selfishness. The advance of civilization has already placed a salutary check on plunder by force; it remains for the march of intellect to discover one for plunder by stratagem. But we must be cautious; in desiring the higher steps of the ladder of wisdom and virtue, we must not undervalue those we have attained, and in our headlong haste, stumble; and, like our neighbours of the continent, fall back on the frightful abyss of anarchy that lays below! 'Tis well to rise in excellence; I hate the cant of dreading all chance: but, to keep to the simile of the ladder, let us take care that the lifting foot be firmly placed on the step above, ere the standing one be removed from the step below."
"Is there not some danger," said Lord Darlingford, "of a property-tax sending capital out of the kingdom?"
"It must be very easy," replied Henry, "for the inventors of all sorts of protecting duties to devise a means of meeting that difficulty, by some ingeniously arranged tax on the exportation of property, whether income or capital, with a tremendously deterring fine on any attempt at imposition; and minor exactments, to hunt evasion through all its windings. There might, also," he added, "be an alien tax, to prevent the foreign artizan from sharing the immunity from taxation, purchased by our own rich for our own poor."
"Is there not some danger," said Lady Arden, "that the deteriorated incomes of the great, by obliging them to lessen their establishments and expenditure, would throw many people out of employment, and so increase the numbers of the poor?"