Political Pamphlets

by Unknown

The writers and speakers who labour in the cause of corruption, have taken great pains to make the labouring classes believe that they are not taxed; that the taxes which are paid by the landlords, farmers, and tradesmen, do not affect you, the journeymen and labourers; and that the tax-makers have been very lenient towards you. But, I hope that you see to the bottom of these things now. You must be sensible that if all your employers were totally ruined in one day, you would be wholly without employment and without bread; and, of course, in whatever degree your employers are deprived of their means, they must withhold means from you. In America the most awkward common labourer receives five shillings a day, while provisions are cheaper in that country than in this. Here, a carter, boarded in the house, receives about seven pounds a year; in America, he receives about thirty pounds a year. What is it that makes this difference? Why, in America the whole of the taxes do not amount to more than about ten shillings a head upon the whole of the population; while in England they amount to nearly six pounds a head! There, a journeyman or labourer may support his family well, and save from thirty to sixty pounds a year: here, he amongst you is a lucky man, who can provide his family with food and with decent clothes to cover them, without any hope of possessing a penny in the days of sickness or of old age. There, the Chief Magistrate receives six thousand pounds a year; here, the civil list surpasses a million of pounds in amount, and as much is allowed to each of the Princesses in one year, as the chief magistrate of America receives in two years, though that country is nearly equal to this in population.

A Mr. Preston, a lawyer of great eminence, and a great praiser of Pitt, has just published a pamphlet, in which is this remark: 'It should always be remembered, that the eighteen pounds a year paid to any placeman or pensioner, withdraws from the public the means of giving active employment to one individual as the head of a family; thus depriving five persons of the means of sustenance from the fruits of honest industry and active labour, and rendering them paupers.' Thus this supporter of Pitt acknowledges the great truth that the taxes are the cause of a people's poverty and misery and degradation. We did not stand in need of this acknowledgment; the fact has been clearly proved before; but it is good for us to see the friends and admirers of Pitt brought to make this confession.

It has been attempted to puzzle you with this sort of question: 'If taxes be the cause of the people's misery, how comes it that they were not so miserable before the taxes were reduced as they are now?' Here is a fallacy which you will be careful to detect. I know that the taxes have been reduced; that is to say, nominally reduced, but not so in fact; on the contrary, they have, in reality, been greatly augmented. This has been done by the sleight-of-hand of paper money. Suppose, for instance, that four years ago, I had a hundred pounds to pay in taxes, then a hundred and thirty bushels of wheat would have paid my share. If I have now seventy-five pounds to pay in taxes, it will require a hundred and ninety bushels of wheat to pay my share of taxes. Consequently, though my taxes are nominally reduced, they are, in reality, greatly augmented. This has been done by the legerdemain of paper money. In 1812, the pound-note was worth only thirteen shillings in silver. It is now worth twenty shillings. Therefore, when we now pay a pound-note to the tax-gatherer, we really pay him twenty shillings where we before paid him thirteen shillings; and the Landholders who lent pound-notes worth thirteen shillings each, are now paid their interest in pounds worth twenty shillings each. And the thing is come to what Sir Francis Burdett told the Parliament it would come to. He told them in 1811, that if they ever attempted to pay the interest of their debt in gold and silver, or in paper money equal in value to gold and silver, the farmers and tradesmen must be ruined, and the journeymen and labourers reduced to the last stage of misery.

Thus, then, it is clear that it is the weight of the taxes, under which you are sinking, which has already pressed so many of you down into the state of paupers, and which now threatens to deprive many of you of your existence. We next come to consider what have been the causes of this weight of taxes. Here we must go back a little in our history, and you will soon see that this intolerable weight has all proceeded from the want of a Parliamentary Reform.

In the year 1764, soon after the present king came to the throne, the annual interest of the Debt amounted to about five millions, and the whole of the taxes to about nine millions. But, soon after this, a war was entered on to compel the Americans to submit to be taxed by the Parliament, without being represented in that Parliament. The Americans triumphed, and, after the war was over, the annual interest of the Debt amounted to about nine millions, and the whole of the taxes to about fifteen millions. This was our situation when the French people began their Revolution. The French people had so long been the slaves of a despotic government, that the friends of freedom in England rejoiced at their emancipation. The cause of Reform, which had never ceased to have supporters in England for a great many years, now acquired new life, and the Reformers urged the Parliament to grant reform, instead of going to war against the people of France. The Reformers said: 'Give the nation reform, and you need fear no revolution.' The Parliament, instead of listening to the Reformers, crushed them, and went to war against the people of France; and the consequence of these wars is, that the annual interest of the Debt now amounts to forty-five millions, and the whole of the taxes, during each of the last several years, to seventy millions. So that these wars have ADDED thirty-six millions a year to the interest of the Debt, and fifty-five millions a year to the amount of the whole of the taxes! This is the price that we have paid for having checked (for it is only checked) the progress of liberty in France; for having forced upon that people the family of Bourbon, and for having enabled another branch of that same family to restore the bloody Inquisition, which Napoleon had put down.

Since the restoration of the Bourbons and of the old Government of France has been, as far as possible, the grand result of the contest; since this has been the end of all our fightings and all our past sacrifices and present misery and degradation; let us see (for the inquiry is now very full of interest) what sort of Government that was which the French people had just destroyed, when our Government began its wars against that people.

If, only twenty-eight years ago, any man in England had said that the Government of France was one that ought to be suffered to exist, he would have been hooted out of any company. It is notorious that that Government was a cruel despotism; and that we and our forefathers always called it such. This description of that Government is to be found in all our histories, in all our Parliamentary debates, in all our books on Government and politics. It is notorious, that the family of Bourbon has produced the most perfidious and bloody monsters that ever disgraced the human form. It is notorious that millions of Frenchmen have been butchered, and burnt, and driven into exile by their commands. It is recorded, even in the history of France, that one of them said that the putrid carcass of a Protestant smelt sweet to him. Even in these latter times, so late as the reign of Louis XIV., it is notorious that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were put to the most cruel death. In some instances, they were burnt in their houses; in others they were shut into lower rooms, while the incessant noise of kettle-drums over their heads, day and night, drove them to raving madness. To enumerate all the infernal means employed by this tyrant to torture and kill the people, would fill a volume. Exile was the lot of those who escaped the swords, the wheels, the axes, the gibbets, the torches of his hell-hounds. England was the place of refuge for many of these persecuted people. The grandfather of the present Earl of Radnor, and the father of the venerable Baron Maseres were amongst them; and it is well known that England owes no inconsiderable part of her manufacturing skill and industry to that atrocious persecution. Enemies of freedom, wherever it existed, this family of Bourbon, in the reign of Louis XIV. and XV., fitted out expeditions for the purpose of restoring the Stuarts to the throne of England, and thereby caused great expense and blood-shed to this nation; and, even the Louis who was beheaded by his subjects, did, in the most perfidious manner, make war upon England, during her war with America. No matter what was the nature of the cause, his conduct was perfidious; he professed peace while he was preparing for war. His object could not be to assist freedom, because his own subjects were slaves.

Such was the family that were ruling in France when the French Revolution began. After it was resolved to go to war against the people of France, all the hirelings of corruption were set to work to gloss over the character and conduct of the old Government, and to paint in the most horrid colours the acts of vengeance which the people were inflicting on the numerous tyrants, civil, military, and ecclesiastical, whom the change of things had placed at their mercy. The people's turn was now come, and, in the days of their power, they justly bore in mind the oppressions which they and their forefathers had endured. The taxes imposed by the Government became at last intolerable. It had contracted a great debt to carry on its wars. In order to be able to pay the interest of this debt, and to support an enormous standing army in time of peace, it laid upon the people burdens which they could no longer endure. It fined and flogged fathers and mothers if their children were detected in smuggling. Its courts of justice were filled with cruel and base judges. The nobility treated the common people like dogs; these latter were compelled to serve as soldiers, but were excluded from all share, or chance of honour and command, which were engrossed by the nobility.

Now, when the time came for the people to have the power in their hands, was it surprising that the first use they made of it was to take vengeance on their oppressors? I will not answer this question myself. It shall be answered by Mr. Arthur Young, the present Secretary of the Board of Agriculture. He was in France at the time, and living upon the very spot, and having examined into the causes of the Revolution, he wrote and published the following remarks, in his Travels, vol. i. page 603:—

'It is impossible to justify the excesses of the people on their taking up arms; they were certainly guilty of cruelties; it is idle to deny the facts, for they have been proved too clearly to admit of doubt. But is it really the people to whom we are to impute the whole? Or to their oppressors, who had kept them so long in a state of bondage? He who chooses to be served by slaves and by ill-treated slaves, must know that he holds both his property and his life by a tenure far different from those who prefer the service of well-treated freemen; and he who dines to the music of groaning sufferers, must not, in the moment of insurrection, complain that his sons' throats are cut. When such evils happen, they surely are more imputable to the tyranny of the master than to the cruelty of the servant. The analogy holds with the French peasants. The murder of a seigneur, or a country seat in flames, is recorded in every newspaper; the rank of the person who suffers attracts notice; but where do we find the registers of that seigneur's oppressions of his peasantry, and his exactions of feudal services from those whose children were dying around them for want of bread? Where do we find the minutes that assigned these starving wretches to some vile pettifogger, to be fleeced by impositions, and mockery of justice, in the seigneural courts? Who gives us the awards of the Intendant and his sub-delegues, which took off the taxes of a man of fashion, and laid them with accumulated weight on the poor, who were so unfortunate as to be his neighbours? Who has dwelt sufficiently upon explaining all the ramifications of despotism, regal, aristocratical, and ecclesiastical, pervading the whole mass of the people; reaching, like a circulating fluid, the most distant capillary tubes of poverty and wretchedness? In these cases the sufferers are too ignoble to be known; and the mass too indiscriminate to be pitied. But should a philosopher feel and reason thus? Should he mistake the cause for the effect? and, giving all his pity to the few, feel no compassion for the many, because they suffer in his eyes not individually but by millions? The excesses of the people cannot, I fear, be justified; it would undoubtedly have done them credit, both as men and as Christians, if they had possessed their new acquired power with moderation. But let it be remembered that the populace in no country ever use power with moderation; excess is inherent in their aggregate constitution: and as every Government in the world knows that violence infallibly attends power in such hands, it is doubly bound in common sense, and for common safety, so to conduct itself, that the people may not find an interest in public confusions. They will always suffer much and long, before they are effectually roused; nothing, therefore, can kindle the flame but such oppressions of some classes or order in society as give able men the opportunity of seconding the general mass; discontent will diffuse itself around; and if the Government take not warning in time, it is alone answerable for all the burnings and all the plunderings and all the devastation and all the blood that follow.'