A PROPOSAL FOR AN ACT OF PARLIAMENT, TO PAY OFF THE DEBT OF THE NATION, WITHOUT TAXING THE SUBJECT.
The debts contracted some years past for the service and safety of the nation, are grown so great, that under our present distressed condition by the want of trade, the great remittances to pay absentees, regiments serving abroad, and many other drains of money, well enough known and felt; the kingdom seems altogether unable to discharge them by the common methods of payment: And either a poll or land tax would be too odious to think of, especially the latter, because the lands, which have been let for these ten or dozen years past, were raised so high, that the owners can, at present, hardly receive any rent at all. For, it is the usual practice of an Irish tenant, rather than want land, to offer more for a farm than he knows he can be ever able to pay, and in that case he grows desperate, and pays nothing at all. So that a land-tax upon a racked estate would be a burthen wholly insupportable.
The question will then be, how these national debts can be paid, and how I can make good the several particulars of my proposal, which I shall now lay open to the public.
The revenues of their Graces and Lordships the Archbishops and Bishops of this kingdom (excluding the fines) do amount by a moderate computation to _36,800l._ _per ann._ I mean the rents which the bishops receive from their tenants. But the real value of those lands at a full rent, taking the several sees one with another, is reckoned to be at least three-fourths more, so that multiplying _36,800l._ by four, the full rent of all the bishops' lands will amount to _147,200l._ _per ann._ from which subtracting the present rent received by their lordships, that is _36,800l._ the profits of the lands received by the first and second tenants (who both have great bargains) will rise to the sum of _110,400l._ _per ann._ which lands, if they were to be sold at twenty-two years' purchase, would raise a sum of _2,428,800l._ reserving to the Bishops their present rents, only excluding fines.[171]
Of this sum I propose, that out of the one-half which amounts to _1,214,400l._ so much be applied as will entirely discharge the debts of the nation, and the remainder laid up in the treasury, to supply contingencies, as well as to discharge some of our heavy taxes, until the kingdom shall be in a better condition.