To begin with one particular, in which the landed interest are greatly and unjustly exempted, while the other classes are severely and unjustly burdened. There is no duty on bequests or inheritance in land, while there is such a duty, and a very heavy one, in movable succession. The legacy duty on succession, from one unconnected with the legatee by blood, is ten per cent.; from relations six, and from parents one per cent. By the aid of the probate duty, which must be paid by the executors, and the expense of suing out letters of administration in England, or an edict and confirmation as executor in Scotland, these duties are practically nearly doubled. Succession in land, on the other hand, costs nothing, at least nothing requires to be paid to government; and though the expense of making up titles to landed estates is often very heavy, that is a burden for the benefit of lawyers, not the good of the state. A poor man who gets a legacy of £100, pays £10 direct to the Exchequer, and the executor, in addition, pays the heavy stamp on probate of the succession; but the great landholder succeeds to £100,000 a-year without paying a shilling to the state.
A creditor in Scotland, who succeeds to a bond for £100,000, heritably secured, pays nothing; if it is on personal security, he pays the full legacy duty of £10,000.
This glaring inequality, the remnant of the days of feudal oppression, or the relic of a time when the landholders had no money, and taxes could be extracted from movable property only, should forthwith be abolished. Succession of all kinds, whether in land, bonds heritably secured, or movable funds, should be taxed at the same rate. And by the addition of the vast amount of the landed property to the produce of the succession duty, it would be in the power of Government to reduce the general tax at least a half without any diminution, probably a large increase, in the general result. This must be at once apparent, when it is recollected that out of £5,303,000, which the income tax produced in 1845, from Britain, no less than £2,666,000, or nearly a half, came from the land. When it is recollected that the remainder embraced, besides income from realized money, no less than £1,541,000 for professional income, which of course corresponds to a comparatively small amount of realized capital, it is evident how great an increase to the taxable amount of succession this most equitable change would produce. It need hardly be said that the land should pay on so many years' purchase, say thirty in Great Britain, and twenty in Ireland of the clear rent, after deducting the interest of mortgages or heritable bonds or jointures. They would pay the tax on the succession of their holders respectively. And the distinction as to the lesser amount of the tax to be paid by children and relations, than strangers, now observed in the succession to personal property, should be applied also to landed succession.
This is one obvious burden, which should be applied equally to landed as to any other class of proprietors. But there are several particulars in which they are most unjustly subjected to burdens from which other classes are relieved; and if they get justice done them in this respect, they could well afford to pay the succession duty.
In the first place, the levying of the Poor's Rate as a burden exclusively laid on real property in England, that is, lands and houses, to the entire liberation of personal property or professional incomes, is a most monstrous inequality—indefensible on every principle of justice or expedience, and the long continuance of which can only be explained by the well known and proverbial supineness of that class of men, and their inability to rouse themselves to any combined or general effort, even for matters in which their own vital interests are concerned. The Poor's Rate, it is well known, is, especially in England, a very heavy burden. It amounted, prior to the late change in the law in England, to above £8,000,000 a-year: and although it was at first considerably reduced in the years immediately succeeding the first introduction of that Act in 1834, yet it has been steadily rising since, and has now nearly attained its former level.[21] Under the most favourable circumstances it cannot be estimated in round numbers at less than £6,000,000 a-year; in seasons of distress it never fails to reach £7,000,000. Scotland hitherto has paid less, because under the administration of the old law, the support afforded to the poor was miserably stinted, and quite inadequate to meet their necessities. This was fully exposed by the efforts of Dr. Alison and other distinguished philanthropists, and a parliamentary inquiry having demonstrated the truth of their statements, the Act of 1846 introduced a more humane and careful provision for the poor. Under the operation of this Act, the Poor Rate in Scotland has in most places considerably, and in some alarmingly, increased. The dreadful state of Ireland, suffering less under the failure, total as it has been, of the potato crop, than the general indigent condition of the poor, has at length forcibly aroused the attention of all classes in the empire, and it may confidently be predicted that the mockery of supposing the Irish paupers, 2,300,000 in number, to be provided for because £240,000 a-year, or about two shillings a head a-year, is levied for their relief on a rental of above £12,000,000 annually, cannot much longer be maintained. The Poor's Rate, therefore, is a subject which already interests deeply, and is likely to interest still more deeply, every part of the empire, and it is of the highest importance to consider what are the principles on which, in conformity with justice and expedience, it should be levied.
The monstrous injustice of the present system will be rendered apparent by a single example. Manufactories, collieries, iron-works, and commercial towns, are, it is well known, the great producers of the poor, because they bring together the labouring classes in vast numbers from all quarters while trade is prosperous, and leave them in a state of suffering or destitution a burden on the landholders the moment it becomes depressed. The commercial classes, too, are immediately and directly benefited by the labour of these manufacturing poor while they retain their health; while the landholders in their vicinity are only so indirectly and in a lesser degree. This is decisively demonstrated by the colossal fortunes so frequently made in the commercial classes, contrasted with the declining circumstances or actual insolvency of the landholders by whom they are surrounded. Do these, the merchants and manufacturers, pay the larger proportion of the poor tax, thus rendered inevitable by the nature of their operations, which are in so high a degree beneficial to themselves? Quite the reverse: they do not, in proportion to their profits, pay a tenth part of its amount. The poor's rate, as at present levied, is on the rural proprietors an Income, on burgh inhabitants a House tax. The difference is prodigious, and leads to results in practice of the grossest injustice.
A landowner has an estate of £2000 a-year in a parish of which the poor's-rate is 1s. in the pound, or £100 a-year on his property. A manufactory is established, or an iron-work set agoing, or a coal mine opened upon it, from which the fortunate owner derives £50,000 a-year of profit. The buildings on it, however, are only valued at £2000 a-year. He pays for his pauper creating work, yielding him £50,000 a-year, £100 annually, the same as what the landowner in the same parish pays for his pauper-feeding estate of £2000 a-year. In other words, in proportion to the respective incomes, the landholder, who had no hand in bringing in the poor, and derives little or nothing from their labour, pays just five-and-twenty times as much as the manufacturer who introduced them, and is daily making a colossal fortune by their exertions! And this becomes the more unjust when it is recollected, that under the present system of free trade in corn and easy communication with distant quarters which railways and steam-boats afford, the little benefit the neighbouring landholders formerly derived from the presence of such manufacturing crowds, is fast disappearing. But further, the manufacturer or mine-owner having got off thus easily during the time of prosperous trade, when he was realising his fortune, stops his works, and discharges his workmen when the adverse season arrives. The rateable value of the manufactory or the mine has, for the present, almost or wholly disappeared, and the poor starving workmen are handed over to be supported by the land-owner.
Persons not practically acquainted with these matters may think this statement is overcharged: on the contrary, it is within the truth in some instances. We know an instance of a great iron master, whose profits average above £100,000 a-year, who pays less poor's rates for the poor he has mainly created, than a landholder in the same parish, of £2000 a-year, who never brought a pauper on its funds in his life. Such is the consequences of the present barbarous system of levying the poor's rate as an income tax on the landlords who are burdened with paupers, and only a house tax on the manufacturers who create and profit by them. The first thing to be done towards the introduction of a just system of direct taxation is to lay the maintenance of the poor equally on all classes; and above all to abolish the present most unjust system of making it only a house tax on the producers of poor in towns, and an income tax on their feeders in the country.
The Land Tax is another burden, exclusively affecting real property, which should either be abolished, altogether or levied equally on all classes. Its amount is not so great as the poor's rate, nevertheless it is considerable, as it produces about £1,172,000 a-year.[22]
The whole Assessed Taxes, though not avowedly and exclusively a tax on the landed interest, are, practically speaking, and in reality, a burden on them almost entirely; at least they are so much heavier on the landowners than the inhabitants of towns, that the burden is nothing in comparison on urban indwellers. Had they been practically felt as a grievance by the urban population they would long since have shared the fate of the house tax and been abolished. They have so long been kept up only because, with a few exceptions, they press almost exclusively upon that passive and supine class of landlords, the natural prey of Chancellors of the Exchequer, whom it seems generally impossible by any exertions, or the advent of any danger how urgent soever, to rouse to any common measure of defence. It no doubt sounds well to say that the assessed taxes are laid generally on luxuries, and therefore they are paid equally by all classes which indulge in them. But a closer examination will show that this view is entirely fallacious, and that the subjects actually taxed, though really luxuries to urban, are necessary aids to rural life. For example, a carriage, a riding horse, a coachman, a groom, are really luxuries in town, and their use may be considered as a fair test of affluent, or at least easy circumstances. But in the country they are absolutely necessaries. They are indispensable to business, to health, to mutual communication, to society, to existence. What similarity is there between the situation of a merchant with £1000 a-year, living in a comfortable town house, with an omnibus driving past his door every five minutes, a stand of cabs within call, and dining three days in the week at a club where he needs no servants of his own; and a landholder enjoying the same income, living in a country situation, with no neighbour within five miles, and having six miles to ride or drive to the nearest town or railway station where his business is to be transacted, or where a public conveyance can be reached?