Thus, it appears that, setting aside the tithe, as not the land-owner's property, and, therefore, a separate estate, and not, properly speaking, a burden on land; and saying nothing of the malt-tax, which produces annually £4,500,000 a-year, on the supposition that, at present at least, that falls as a burden on the consumer; and saying nothing of the income-tax, which, as will immediately appear, falls as a much severer burden on land-rents than commercial incomes,--these distinct, clear, and indisputable burdens laid on land, from which property of other sorts in England are exempt, stand thus:--
I. Poor's Rate in 1845, a very prosperous year, £6,847,205 II. Land-tax, 1,164,042 III. Highway Rates, 1,169,891 IV. Church Rates, 506,812 V. Police, Lunatic, and Bridge-rates, estimated, 500,000 VI. Excess of assessed taxes falling on land above personal estates, estimated, 1,500,000 VII. Stamp-duties peculiar to land, 1,200,000 ---------- £12,887,950
The rental of real property in England, rated to the Poor's Rates, is £62,540,030;[28] but the real rental, as ascertained by the more rigid and accurate returns for the Income-tax, is £85,802,735. On the first of these sums, the taxes exclusively falling on land amount to a tax of _twenty-five_, on the last of EIGHTEEN per cent. annually. This is in _addition_ to the Income-tax, and all the indirect taxes which the owners of land and houses pay in common with all the rest of the community, and which by it are complained of as so oppressive.
Enough, it is thought, has now been said to prove the extreme inequality and injustice with which direct public burdens are levied in this country, and the necessity for a thorough and searching revision of our system of taxation, in this respect, especially since, from the way in which the tide sets, it has become so evident that direct will progressively be more extensively substituted for indirect taxation. But, in addition to these, there are several other circumstances which aggravate fourfold the burdens thus exclusively laid on real property.
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.