I. In the first place, the alterations in the monetary system of the country, by the resumption of cash payments in 1819, followed up in Scotland and Ireland, as well as England, by the stringent Bankers' Act of 1844, has added fully forty per cent. to the weight of all taxes and other burdens, public or private, affecting landed property, because it has altered, to that extent, the value of money, and diminished the price of the articles of rural produce from which the laud-holders' means of paying them are derived. If the prices of wheat and of all other kinds of agricultural produce, for ten years before 1819, and ten years before 1845, be compared, it will at once appear that the difference is even greater than has been here stated.[29] But that consideration is of vital importance in this question, for if the price of all kinds of rural produce has declined nearly as nine to six by the operation of these monetary changes, the weight of debts and taxes, of course, must have been increased in the same proportion. We are not now to enter into any argument as to the expedience or necessity of that great change in our monetary system: we assume it as a fact, and refer to it only as rendering imperative a revision of the direct taxes bearing so heavily on the great interests whose means of paying them have been thus so seriously abridged.
II. In the second place, and this is a most important circumstance, the burdens which have been mentioned all fall as a burden on the landowner, how much soever his property may be charged with mortgages, jointures, or other real burdens. These must all be paid in full by himself alone, how small soever be the fraction of the nominal income of his estate which remains to him after discharging the annual amount of its real burdens. There is no right to deduct poor's rates, land tax, or other burdens affecting land, from mortgages, or even jointure holders, unless they are expressly declared liable to such, which is very seldom the case. These annual charges must all be paid clear to the creditor, without any deduction, except that of the income tax, which the debtor is allowed to retain by the Act imposing it. But this consideration is of vital importance to the landholders when the amount of their mortgages and other real burdens is taken into consideration. Their annual amount has been estimated by very competent judges at two-thirds of the income derived from land, although, as there is no general record in England for real burdens, their amount cannot at present be accurately ascertained. But take it, in order to be within the mark, at three-fifths of the real rental, as ascertained by the income tax returns, these show, as already stated, an income of £85,000,000 annually derived from land. Take three-fifths, or £51,000,000 of this sum as absorbed annually by mortgagers and annuitants holding real and preferable securities over land, and there will remain £34,000,000 annually to the holders of land and houses. Now on this £34,000,000 the real burdens above mentioned, amounting to £12,900,000 a-year, are fastened. If to these be added the income tax paid by the land, amounting, by the income tax returns, to £2,112,000, the clear income derived by landholders from the real property of England, with the direct taxes paid by them, will stand thus—
| Clear Income as above | £34,000,000 | |
| Deduct direct taxes levied exclusively on land, | £12,900,000 | |
| Income tax paid by land, | 2,100,000 | |
| 15,000,000 | ||
| Remains, | £19,000,000 |
Thus it appears that out of thirty-four millions of clear rental left to the owners of real property in England, no less than fifteen millions, or nearly a half, is taken from them annually in the shape of direct taxes which they cannot by any possibility avoid! How long would the commercial or city industry of England stand direct taxes to the amount of 46 per cent on their clear income? If that had been the state of their finances, we should have had no clamour in 1831 for enlarged representation, or in 1846 for the destruction, to their advantage, of all the protection to other branches of industry. We should have had no Anti-Corn Law League subscriptions of £100,000 to buy up all the venal talent in the form of itinerant orators and pamphleteers in the country. We should have had no conversions of conceding premiers by the weight of external agitation. In social, not less than military warfare, the longest purse carries the day; and the party which is the heaviest burdened is sure to be in the end overthrown.
III. The abolition of the Corn Laws, partially at present, entirely at the end of two years and a half, by the bill of 1846, not only has made this enormous burden of 46 per cent. on their clear income deductis debitis a permanent load on the landowners, but it has rendered it a hopeless one, because it has destroyed every means which they previously might have possessed of indemnifying themselves for its weight, by sharing its oppression with other classes. This is a matter of the very highest importance, which will soon make itself felt, though, in consequence of the nearly total failure of the potato crop in the west of Great Britain and Ireland, it has not yet been so. The usual resource of persons, who are burdened with heavy payments to government, is to lay as much as they can of it on others, by enhancing as much as possible the price of their produce. It is in this way that indirect taxes fall in general on the consumer; and it is on this principle that, in estimating the burdens exclusively affecting land, we have not included the malt duty, because it is in great part at least paid by the consumers of beer or porter. But, of course, if it becomes from any cause impossible for the party burdened, in the first instance, to raise the price of his produce, or if, on the contrary, he is compelled to lower it, the whole tax will fall direct on himself, because he will be without the means of laying it on the purchaser from him.
Now, the abolition of the Corn Laws has done this. In two years and a half, the whole grain of Poland and America will be admitted into the English market at the nominal duty of a shilling a quarter. It will be impossible for the farmers and landowners after that to keep up the price of grain of any sort in the British market beyond the prices in Prussia, and with the addition of 5s. a quarter for the cost of transit, and perhaps half as much for the profit of the importer. Wheat, beyond all question, will fall on an average of years to forty shillings a quarter, barley and oats to twenty. This is just as certain as the parallel reduction of average prices of wheat from 87s. a quarter to 56s. has been by the money law of 1819. Accordingly, now that the stress is over, they have no longer an interest to conceal or pervert the truth; the anti-corn law journals are the first to proclaim this result as certain, and they coolly recommend the English farmers to abandon altogether the cultivation of wheat, which can no longer be expected to pay, and to lay out their lands in pasture grass and the producing of garden stuffs. But amidst this general and now admitted decline in the price of grain, the 46 per cent. of direct burdens on land will continue unchanged; happy if it does not receive a large augmentation. The effect of this will be to augment the weight of the burdens to which they are already subjected on the landholders by at least twenty per cent., and, in addition, to throw upon them the whole malt tax, now amounting to £4,500,000 a-year. The moment the British farmer is obliged to lower the price of his barley to the level of the continental nations, where labour is so much cheaper, and rents comparatively light, the whole malt tax falls, without deduction or limitation, on British agriculture.
IV. The income tax, though apparently a burden equally affecting all classes, in reality attaches with much more severity to the landed than to any other class. There is, indeed, an advantage unduly enjoyed by capitalists of all sorts, landed or moneyed, in comparison with annuitants or professional men, which, as will immediately appear, loudly calls for a remedy. But, as compared with the merchant or moneyed man, who derives his income from trade or realised capital in a movable form, the landholder is, in every direct taxation, exposed to a most serious disadvantage. His income cannot be concealed, and it is returned by others than himself. The farmer or tenant, who has no interest in the matter, returns his landlord's rent. The trader, shopkeeper, or merchant estimates and returns his own income. The possessions of the first, and their annual rental, are universally known, and concealment as to them is impossible or sure of detection; the gains of the last are entirely secret, and wrapped up, even to the owner, in books or accounts, generally unintelligible in all cases but those of considerable merchants—to all but the persons who prepared them. Whoever is practically acquainted with human nature will at once perceive the immense effect which this difference must have on the amount of the burden, in appearance the same, as it affects the different classes of society.
And the result of this difference appears in the most decisive manner, in the amount of the sums paid by the different classes of society, as shown by the income tax returns. From them, it appears that the contributions from commerce, trades, and professions of all sorts, is not quite half of that obtained from landed property. The first is, in round numbers, £2,700,000; the second, £1,500,000.[30] But let it be recollected that the £1,541,000 a-year, which, in 1845, was paid by professional men of all descriptions, in Great Britain, included, besides merchants and traders, the whole class of professional men not traders, as lawyers, attorneys, physicians, &c. At the very lowest computation their share of this must amount to £341,000 a-year. There remains then £1,200,000 as the contribution of trade and commerce, of all kinds, from Great Britain, while that from land is £2,670,000 a-year, or considerably more than double. Can it be believed that this is founded on a fair return of incomes by the commercial classes? Are they prepared to admit that their property and income, and consequent interest and title to sway in the state, is not half of that which is derived from land? Or do they shelter themselves under the comfortable assurance that their real income is incomparably greater, and that they quietly escape with a half or a third of the income tax which they ought to pay? We leave it to the trading class, and their abettors in the press, to settle this question with the commissioners of income tax throughout the country. We mention the fact, that trade and commerce do not pay half the income tax that land does, as a reason, among the many others which exist, for a thorough and radical reform of our financial system, so far as direct taxation is concerned.
Whoever considers seriously, and in an impartial spirit, the various particulars which have now been stated, will not only cease to wonder at the frequent, it may almost be said universal, embarrassment of the landed proprietors, but he will arrive at the conclusion, that if they continue much longer unchanged, they must terminate in their general ruin. We say general ruin, because it will not be universal. The great landowners, the magnates, whether moneyed or territorial, of the land will alone survive the general wreck. They will, by degrees, swallow up all the smaller estates in their neighbourhood; and it will come to be literally true in Britain what was said, by a Roman emperor, of Gaul, in the decline of the empire, "That the estates of the rich go on continually increasing and absorbing all lesser estates around them, till they come to the estate of another as rich as themselves." With direct taxes, amounting to 50 or 60 per cent. on the disposable income, which, under the change of prices, induced by the change in the corn laws, they will very soon be, even without any addition from farther taxes, it is wholly impossible that any landowner who does not possess enormous tracts of country, or vast funded or moneyed property in addition to his territorial possessions, can avoid insolvency. What the effect of the total destruction of the middle class of British landholders must be on the balance of the constitution, and the state of society in these islands, it is not our present purpose to inquire. Suffice it to say, that it is precisely the state of things which signalised the later stages of the Roman empire, and coincides with so many other circumstances in marking the striking analogy between our present condition and that which proved fatal to the ancient masters of the world.
Well may the Lords' Committee on the burdens affecting landed property have said, "Neither the law nor the spirit of the constitution originally contemplated so partial a system of taxation."[31] In truth, originally some of the heaviest present exclusive burdens on real property were born equally by personal estates. "The poor law of Elizabeth," says the report, "and the land tax of William and Mary, embraced every species of income; but in consequence of the comparative facility of rating visible property, and the small amount of income derived from other sources in the early period of their assessment, personalty seems to have escaped its legal share of contribution to the public service. The liability of stock in trade, however, was continued by law to a late period, and is, up to the present day, only suspended by an annual act of exemption." The Committee here point out, or rather hint at the real cause of the extraordinary exemption from their due share of the public burdens which has grown up insensibly in favour of movable property. Land has two admirable qualities in the estimation of Chancellors of the Exchequer. It can neither be concealed nor removed. Movable estates, stock in trade, are susceptible of both. The landholder has no secret invisible funds which he can bring forth when desired in the form of convenient loans to government to meet the state necessities. He has only a visible fixed estate, which can neither be concealed nor withdrawn from its annual burdens. Hence the influence and exemptions of the one, and the injustice experienced by and burdens of the other.