Janus in Modern Life

by W. M. Flinders Petrie

The only way to escape the deadly effects of income tax upon home manufactures and produce would be to lay a countervailing duty on all imports, and a bounty on all exports. Then, and only then, would the manufacturer or farmer here be on exactly the same footing as one abroad. Then, and only then, would free trade be really carried out. So long as taxes fall on home production or home capital, which do not fall similarly abroad, so long free trade cannot exist.

Another highly immoral view of taxation is that of "plucking the goose so that it feels it least." Such a maxim was appropriate and excellent for an opportunist minister of an autocratic sovereign. But the first necessity for the political health of a democracy is that the individual shall feel every tax; such is the only way to prevent the squandering of public money by the votes of ignorant taxpayers. It would be very wholesome if the national expenditure was presented as a series of personal bills, showing how much was spent on each department by an average £50, or £100, or £200 householder. He would then be as much ashamed of the smallness of some items as of the largeness of others.

What is needed in place of the tax upon industry is a tax upon extravagance. We are accustomed to taxes which far exceed the prime cost upon tobacco and alcohol; and other luxuries should also be similarly taxed. If instead of taxing income (which is often requisite for reasonable living, or else usefully spent on improvements of the world), we had the luxuries taxed, the only people to complain (if the change were gradual) would be those who wasted instead of using their income. Let all ostentation be taxed very heavily, spacious rooms, large numbers of servants, costly food, motor cars (not professionally needed), entrance money for amusements, and tailors' and milliners' bills; and then a much smaller amount of such extravagance will equally bespeak wealth, and gain as much social consideration as at present. Such would be a moral taxation in place of the present wholly immoral and indefensible system of taxing industry and leaving waste unchecked.

We will now look to other eventual results of small continual action. The effect of transferring little by little the property in Irish land to the present occupiers has not been sufficiently noticed. For the present generation such a transference was merry enough to the tenant. But when he sells to another tenant what is to happen? Will a future tenant enter and gradually expropriate the present tenant, by treating him as a landlord? Certainly the present tenant will not be so foolish as to be thus trapped, he will demand money on the nail. How then is the future tenant to get his capital to buy the land? In most cases he will have to get it by borrowing on mortgage. And if the government is not prepared to always keep open a loan office for every incoming tenant to the end of time, a loan society or company must be his resort. Then if he should not pay this rent to the distant intangible society, his mortgage will be foreclosed. In place of a body of landlords, and landlords' agents who could always be personally approached, Ireland will fall into the hands of a landlordism of distant money-lenders without souls or feelings, and whom neither blandishments nor bullets can affect.

The remedy for land difficulties and various ills, that has been so often proposed, namely the State ownership of the land, is by no means promising. The greatest objection that can be flung at a landlord is that he is an absentee. No amount of agency, no excellence in the subordinate, is thought to compensate for the personal interest, the personal influence and care, of a good conscientious landlord spending his life among his tenants. Yet the State ownership would be worse than any absentee landlord. The agent would be that of an impersonal government, and responsible to nobody so long as he fulfilled a certain set of hard rules. He would have no personality more or less pliable behind him, but would blindly carry out the general dictates of a Parliament or a Revenue office, which neither knew nor cared about any personal exceptions or local details. We all know the ways of the Inland Revenue already; the extortions which have to be tediously reclaimed at a greater cost of time than the refunded money is worth; the starving of the Post Office in order to wring a profit of 50 per cent. on the whole correspondence of the country; the various illegal demands which have had to be resisted by legal trial, and appeal over appeal, at a ruinous cost to those who will not be cheated; we see in France and Italy the atrophy of a railway system which is ruled by government officials. And yet unobservant enthusiasts wish that every field should be under some petty official tied by red tape, and every farmer bound by laws and regulations which could never be applied to even a small district without individual hardship. The townsman cannot be allowed to play political experiments with the largest industry of England, of which he is profoundly ignorant: it must rest with the farmer only, to decide if he prefer to be under the Inland Revenue or under his landlord. It is notorious that government lands are administered more wastefully and less remuneratively than any private property; and it would be ruinous to tie up the whole country to such administration. It is useless to say that these are mere abuses which must be rectified. Let them be rectified in the minor scale first, before the system can be applied in the major scale. There is no kind of government in the world that would not ruin this country if it introduced State ownership. Human nature does not allow of it, and only ignorance of human nature could propose it.

Another large effect of trifles is seen in the cumulative character of borrowers. Mr. Harold Cox, M.P., has reminded those who are in favour of rather confiscatory proposals, that a loss of character of a public body, so that their good faith is not certain, may easily mean that they have to pay 4 per cent. instead of 3 per cent. for loans: and hence that all rents of public works paid for by loans will have to be 33 per cent. higher. This loss is far more than could be gained by entire confiscation of ground values, and entire ruin of all landlords. That this is by no means only a future risk may be seen in the stock list any day. India is not entirely safe; there are risks of financial ruin—by conquest, by ruinous wars against invasion, by ruin in insurrection, by ejectment, or by having to drop India owing to a collapse of the navy. Yet all these risks together are thought to be less than the risk of bad faith on the London County Council. Their stock stands at a lower price than India stock. Such is the large result of the many little touches of folly and extravagance which have lowered the financial barometer.

Another instance of remote changes is in the effects of the steam engine and other cheap and rapid communication. The full extent of the changes caused are yet far from being completed. Externally the great change is that of the equalisation of land values for agriculture all over the world, as the produce can be carried from land to land for a small part of its value. Hence tropical lands with rapid growth and high fertility will compete with others; and the cheapness of labour there, owing to the smaller requirements in a warmer climate, will react on all agricultural wages. There will also be a demand for cheap labour to work tropical lands to their full extent; and the facility for transportation of labourers will result in constantly shifting energetic people from rather cooler climates into the hotter land for a time, and withdrawing them again. The same system we already carry out for governing classes in India; and cheap transport will make it possible for an energetic race to hold hot countries continuously, without decay due to enervation by climate, as was the case in all earlier northern invaders.

Internally the changes owing to cheap communication are that land of similar quality equalises in value; and hence the worst land will fall to bottom price all over the country, and cannot be locally of any higher value. Also it will be difficult to get people to live in unpleasant districts, as they can easily shift about; hence wages will need to be higher in such districts, and therefore the land will be still lower. Thus the mobility of the inhabitants exaggerates the variation of land values already due to differing quality. The more bulky industries that need cheap land, and not much labour, will be fixed in the unpleasant districts; and peasant proprietors will tend to the worse land, as being abnormally low in value. Regarding movement of population only, as capable men can move about freely to get work that gives them full scope, the less capable will supplant the capable in all work that they are able to do. Hence we shall no longer find men of high quality leading simple lives in remote districts. The gain to the whole community is clear, but we lose one of the most interesting types of national character. The free and rapid transit in cities will cause them to be much less crowded in one mass. At Chicago men go to business from five miles out in five minutes. Our cumbrous stoppages along the whole route must be entirely given up for the outer districts of London. What is needed is a series of new centres twenty to thirty miles out of London; joined, some to the City, some to the West End, by non-stop trains, at sixty miles an hour. Such is certainly the type of great city which will finally be reached—a county covered with separate centres linked by trains at the highest speed. As we shall note further on, the development of great equatorial estates of European powers, and the growth of immense permanent armaments are both the inevitable result of rapid communication. We see thus how the whole type of human life and conditions has been altered, and the whole balance of circumstances readjusted, by the evolution of cheap motor power.

We have already noticed another effect of this change, in the increase of emigration draining the more capable persons from England, and so leaving a residue inferior in energy, initiative and self-reliance. This deterioration of the occupants of England and Ireland is thus due to the purely mechanical contrivance of a steam engine.

We have now traced the large effects of small economic causes, and we see how such apparently insignificant alterations may be far more effective and act far more beneficially than smashing the social machine with a sledge hammer because it does not run smoothly. We will now turn to look at some of the effects of favourite ideas of the present time.