Part II: Chapter V, 7

2nd " 0 6 14 10 L21 15s

2nd 1000 at 0 9 37 11 59 5

3rd " 1 0 50 0 109 5

(Total amount)

4th 1000 at 1s 6d per pound L75 0s L184 5s

5th " 2 0 100 0 284 5

6th " 3 0 150 0 434 5

7th " 4 0 200 0 634 5

8th " 5 0 250 0 880 5

9th " 6 0 300 0 1100 5

10th " 7 0 350 0 1530 5

11th " 8 0 400 0 1930 5

12th " 9 0 450 0 2380 5

13th " 10 0 500 0 2880 5

14th " 11 0 550 0 3430 5

15th " 12 0 600 0 4030 5

16th " 13 0 650 0 4680 5

17th " 14 0 700 0 5380 5

18th " 15 0 750 0 6130 5

19th " 16 0 800 0 6930 5

20th " 17 0 850 0 7780 5

21st " 18 0 900 0 8680 5

(Total amount)

22nd 1000 at 19s 0d per pound L950 0s L9630 5s

23rd " 20 0 1000 0 10630 5

At the twenty-third thousand, the tax reaches 20s. in the pound; beyond that sum, therefore, every additional thousand yields no profit unless the estate is divided. Yet formidable as this tax appears, I do not believe it will yield as much as the commutation tax. If it yields more, it should be reduced to that amount on estates of less than two or three thousand a year.

On small and middling estates it is lighter than the commutation tax, as intended. Only beyond seven or eight thousand a year does it begin to weigh heavily. Its object is not so much the revenue it yields as the justice of the measure. The aristocracy has sheltered itself too long; this measure restores some of the lost balance.

For an instance of that self-protection, we need only look back to the first excise laws, established at what is called the Restoration, when Charles the Second came to the throne. The aristocratic interest then in power commuted the feudal services it owed by laying a tax on beer brewed for sale. In other words, they bought from Charles an exemption from those services for themselves and their heirs with a tax paid by other people. The aristocracy does not buy beer brewed for sale: it brews its own, free of the duty. If any commutation was needed then, its cost should have fallen on those for whose benefit the exemptions were intended;*37 instead, it was imposed on an entirely different class of people.

But the chief aim of this progressive tax, besides the justice of making taxation more equal, is, as I have said, to root out the swollen influence arising from the unnatural law of primogeniture—one of the chief sources of corruption at elections.

Little good would come of investigating how such enormous estates as thirty, forty, or fifty thousand a year could have arisen when commerce and manufacturing offered no means of acquiring them. It is enough to remedy the evil by enabling them to pass back into the community through the peaceful division of estates among all the heirs and heiresses of those families. This is all the more necessary because the aristocracy has until now settled its younger children and relatives upon the public in useless posts and offices. When those posts are abolished, these dependents will be left without support unless primogeniture is also abolished or superseded.

A progressive tax will largely accomplish this, and it will be in the interest of those most directly concerned, as the following table shows. It gives the net income from each estate after the tax is deducted. An estate yielding more than thirteen or fourteen thousand a year brings its holder little additional profit; the remainder will therefore pass to younger children or other relatives.

TABLE III

Showing the net income of every estate from one thousand

to twenty-three thousand pounds a year

Number of thousands Total tax

per year deducted Net income

L1000 L21 L979

2000 59 1941

3000 109 2891

4000 184 3816

5000 284 4716

6000 434 5566

7000 634 6366

8000 880 7120

9000 1100 7900

10,000 1530 8470

11,000 1930 9070

12,000 2380 9620

13,000 2880 10,120

(Number of thousands (Total tax

per year) deducted) (Net income)

14,000 3430 10,570

15,000 4030 10,970

16,000 4680 11,320

17,000 5380 11,620

18,000 6130 11,870

19,000 6930 12,170

20,000 7780 12,220

21,000 8680 12,320

22,000 9630 12,370

23,000 10,630 12,370

N.B. The odd shillings are omitted from this table.

According to this table, an estate cannot yield more than L12,370 after the land tax and progressive tax. Dividing such estates will thus become a matter of family interest. An estate of L23,000 a year divided into five estates of four thousand each and one of three would be charged only L1,129, or five percent; held by one owner, it would be charged L10,630.

Though we need not inquire into the origin of these estates, their continuation in their present form is another matter. It concerns the nation. The law created the evil of hereditary estates and ought to provide its remedy. Primogeniture should be abolished not only because it is unnatural and unjust, but because the country suffers from it. By depriving younger children, as I have noted, of their rightful inheritance, it burdens the public with the expense of supporting them; and the excessive influence produced by this unjust monopoly of family property violates the freedom of elections. Nor is that all. It wastes national resources. A considerable share of the country's land is made unproductive by the vast parks and hunting grounds this law sustains, at a time when the yearly grain crop cannot meet the nation's needs.*38—In short, the evils of the aristocratic system are so many and so great, and so contrary to everything just, wise, natural, and generous, that many people now numbered among the aristocracy will surely wish to see it abolished once they consider them.

What pleasure can they take in contemplating the vulnerable condition and almost certain poverty of their younger children? Around every aristocratic family hangs a retinue of impoverished relatives, who after a few ages or generations are cast off, left to tell their stories in almshouses, workhouses, and prisons. This is the natural consequence of aristocracy. Peer and beggar often belong to the same family. One extreme produces the other: many must be made poor to make one rich. The system can be maintained by no other means.

The laws of England are especially hostile to two of the most defenseless classes of people: younger children and the poor. I have just spoken of the first. Of the many examples concerning the second, I will mention one to close this subject.

Several laws regulate and limit workers' wages. Why not leave workers as free to make their own bargains as the lawmakers are to rent out their farms and houses? Their labor is all the property they possess. Why infringe on that small property and the little freedom they enjoy? The injustice becomes still clearer when we consider how these laws work. When wages are fixed by what is called a law, the legal wage stays fixed while everything else rises. The very people who make that law continue to impose new taxes by other laws: by one law they increase the cost of living, and by another they take away the means of meeting it.

But if these gentlemen who make laws and taxes think it right to limit the meager return that labor can bring, on which an entire family must live, they must surely count themselves generously treated by a limit on their own incomes of no less than twelve thousand a year—from property neither they nor probably any of their ancestors ever earned, and which they have used so badly.

Having finished this subject, I shall bring its various particulars together before proceeding to other matters.

The first eight articles, mentioned earlier, are:

1 Abolition of two millions in poor-rates.

2 Provision for two hundred and fifty-two thousand poor families at four pounds per child under fourteen years of age; together with an additional two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, this also provides education for one million and thirty thousand children.

3 An annual payment of six pounds each to all poor people, impoverished tradesmen, and others (estimated at seventy thousand) from the age of fifty until sixty.

4 An annual payment of ten pounds each for life to all poor people, impoverished tradesmen, and others (estimated at seventy thousand) aged sixty years.

5 A gift of twenty shillings each for fifty thousand births.

6 A gift of twenty shillings each for twenty thousand marriages.

7 An allowance of twenty thousand pounds for the funeral expenses of people who travel in search of work and die far from their friends.

8 Employment at all times for the intermittently poor in the cities of London and Westminster.

Second Enumeration

9 Abolition of the tax on houses and windows.

10 An allowance of three shillings a week for life to fifteen thousand discharged soldiers, with a proportionate allowance for officers of the disbanded corps.

11 An annual increase of L19,500 in pay for the soldiers who remain.

12 The same allowance for the disbanded navy, and the same increase in pay, as for the army.

13 Abolition of the commutation tax.

14 A plan for a progressive tax designed to root out the unjust and unnatural law of primogeniture and the corrupt influence of the aristocratic system.*39

There remains, as already stated, one million in surplus tax revenue. Some of it will be needed for circumstances not yet apparent; any part not needed will permit a further reduction in taxes of the same amount.

Among the claims justice requires us to address is the condition of lower-ranking revenue officers. It is a disgrace for a government to waste such immense revenue on sinecures and unnecessary offices and nominal officials, while denying even a decent living to those who do the work. For more than one hundred years the salaries of the lower revenue officers have remained at a paltry sum of less than fifty pounds a year. They should be seventy. About one hundred and twenty thousand pounds devoted to this purpose would raise all their salaries to a decent level.

This was proposed almost twenty years ago, but the treasury board of the day recoiled from it, fearing it might prompt similar expectations from the army and navy. Instead, the King, or someone acting for him, asked parliament to increase his own salary by an hundred thousand pounds a year; once that was done, everything else was dropped.

As for another class, the lower clergy, I will not dwell on their condition. But leaving aside every partiality and prejudice for or against different religious forms and practices, simple justice must decide whether one man should receive twenty or thirty pounds a year and another ten thousand. I speak freely on this because I am known not to be a Presbyterian; the cant of court flatterers about church and meetinghouse, kept alive to entertain and bewilder the nation, cannot therefore be directed at me.

You trusting people on both sides, can you not see through this courtly trick? So long as you can be kept arguing and quarreling over church and meetinghouse, you serve the purpose of every courtier, who meanwhile lives on the spoils of taxation and laughs at your credulity. Every religion that teaches people to be good is good; I know of none that teaches them to be bad.

All these calculations assume that only sixteen and a half millions in taxes reach the exchequer after the costs of collection and the refunds at the customhouse and excise office have been deducted. In fact, the sum paid into the exchequer is very nearly, if not quite, seventeen millions. The taxes collected in Scotland and Ireland are spent there, so their savings will come from their own taxes; but if any portion is paid into the English exchequer, it could be sent back. This would make less than one hundred thousand pounds a year of difference.

Only the national debt remains to be considered. In 1789 the interest, excluding the tontine, was L9,150,138. The minister knows best how much the principal has since been reduced. Yet after paying the interest, abolishing the tax on houses and windows, the commutation tax, and the poor-rates, and making every provision for the poor, children's education, support for the aged and the discharged members of the army and navy, and increased pay for those who remain, there will be a surplus of one million.

2nd 1,000 at 0s 6d per pound: £14 10s; total £21 15s2nd 1,000 at 0s 9d per pound: £37 11s; total £59 5s3rd 1,000 at 1s 0d per pound: £50 0s; total £109 5s(Total amount)4th 1,000 at 1s 6d per pound: £75 0s; total £184 5s5th 1,000 at 2s 0d per pound: £100 0s; total £284 5s6th 1,000 at 3s 0d per pound: £150 0s; total £434 5s7th 1,000 at 4s 0d per pound: £200 0s; total £634 5s8th 1,000 at 5s 0d per pound: £250 0s; total £880 5s9th 1,000 at 6s 0d per pound: £300 0s; total £1,100 5s10th 1,000 at 7s 0d per pound: £350 0s; total £1,530 5s11th 1,000 at 8s 0d per pound: £400 0s; total £1,930 5s12th 1,000 at 9s 0d per pound: £450 0s; total £2,380 5s13th 1,000 at 10s 0d per pound: £500 0s; total £2,880 5s14th 1,000 at 11s 0d per pound: £550 0s; total £3,430 5s15th 1,000 at 12s 0d per pound: £600 0s; total £4,030 5s16th 1,000 at 13s 0d per pound: £650 0s; total £4,680 5s17th 1,000 at 14s 0d per pound: £700 0s; total £5,380 5s18th 1,000 at 15s 0d per pound: £750 0s; total £6,130 5s19th 1,000 at 16s 0d per pound: £800 0s; total £6,930 5s20th 1,000 at 17s 0d per pound: £850 0s; total £7,780 5s21st 1,000 at 18s 0d per pound: £900 0s; total £8,680 5s(Total amount)22nd 1,000 at 19s 0d per pound: £950 0s; total £9,630 5s23rd 1,000 at 20s 0d per pound: £1,000 0s; total £10,630 5s

At the twenty-third thousand, the tax reaches 20s. in the pound. Every thousand beyond that can bring in a profit only if the estate is divided. This tax may look severe. Still, I do not think it will raise as much as the commutation tax. If it raises more, the rate on estates worth less than two or three thousand a year should be lowered until the total matches that amount.

For small and medium-sized estates, it is lighter than the commutation tax, as intended. It does not become heavy until an estate brings in more than seven or eight thousand a year. The main point is not how much the tax raises but whether the measure is fair. The aristocracy has protected itself from taxes too much. This measure restores some of the lost balance.

For an example of that protection, look back to the first excise laws, introduced at what is called the Restoration, when Charles the Second came to power. The aristocrats then in power replaced the feudal duties they themselves owed with a tax on beer brewed for sale. In other words, they made a deal with Charles to free themselves and their heirs from those duties, paid for with a tax on other people. Aristocrats do not buy beer brewed for sale. They brew their own beer without paying the tax. If replacing those duties was necessary, those gaining the exemptions should have paid for them;*37 instead, the burden fell on a completely different group of people.

But the chief purpose of this progressive tax, besides making taxes fairer, is to eliminate the excessive influence created by the unnatural law of primogeniture, which gives the eldest child the inheritance. That influence is a major cause of corruption in elections.

It would do no good to investigate how estates earning thirty, forty, or fifty thousand a year first arose, especially when trade and manufacturing were not developed enough to allow fortunes like that to be made. It is enough to fix the problem by putting those estates in a position to return to the wider community. This can happen peacefully by dividing them among all the sons and daughters entitled to inherit in those families. That is all the more necessary because the aristocracy has so far put its younger children and relatives in useless public jobs and offices. Once those jobs are abolished, these people will have no support unless primogeniture is also abolished or overridden.

A progressive tax will largely achieve this. The people most directly involved will have a financial reason to divide their estates, as the following table shows. It shows what each estate brings in after the tax is deducted. Once an estate brings in more than thirteen or fourteen thousand a year, the amount beyond that yields little extra income to its owner. It will therefore pass to younger children or other relatives.

TABLE III

What each estate brings in after tax, from one thousand to twenty-three thousand pounds a year

Annual income; Total tax deducted; Income after tax£1,000; £21; £979£2,000; £59; £1,941£3,000; £109; £2,891£4,000; £184; £3,816£5,000; £284; £4,716£6,000; £434; £5,566£7,000; £634; £6,366£8,000; £880; £7,120£9,000; £1,100; £7,900£10,000; £1,530; £8,470£11,000; £1,930; £9,070£12,000; £2,380; £9,620£13,000; £2,880; £10,120Annual income; Total tax deducted; Income after tax£14,000; £3,430; £10,570£15,000; £4,030; £10,970£16,000; £4,680; £11,320£17,000; £5,380; £11,620£18,000; £6,130; £11,870£19,000; £6,930; £12,170£20,000; £7,780; £12,220£21,000; £8,680; £12,320£22,000; £9,630; £12,370£23,000; £10,630; £12,370

Note: The extra shillings are omitted from this table.

The table shows that an estate can bring in no more than £12,370 after land tax and the progressive tax. Dividing such estates will therefore be in the family's interest. An estate earning £23,000 a year, divided into five estates earning four thousand each and one earning three thousand, will owe just £1,129, or five percent. If one person owns the whole estate, it will owe £10,630.

We need not investigate where those estates came from. Whether they should continue in their present form is another matter. It concerns the whole country. The law created the problem of hereditary estates and should provide the solution. Primogeniture should be abolished, not just because it is unnatural and unfair, but because it harms the country. As I said earlier, it denies younger children their rightful share of the inheritance. The public must then pay to support them. The excessive influence created by this unfair monopoly of family property also violates the freedom of elections. That is not all. It wastes national resources. Large parks and hunting grounds, maintained because of this law, leave much of the country's land unproductive. Meanwhile, the annual grain harvest does not meet the country's needs.*38 In short, aristocratic rule has so many serious faults and is so at odds with fairness, wisdom, nature, and kindness that, once they think about them, many people now counted as aristocrats will surely want the system abolished.

What pleasure can they get from seeing their younger children exposed to almost certain poverty? Every aristocratic family has poor relatives depending on it. After a few generations, the family casts them off. They end up telling their stories in almshouses, workhouses, and prisons. That is the natural result of aristocracy. A peer and a beggar often belong to the same family. One extreme creates the other: making one person rich requires making many people poor. There is no other way to keep the system going.

English laws are especially hostile to two groups, both among the most defenseless: younger children and the poor. I have just discussed the first group. I will give one of many possible examples concerning the second, then end this subject.

Several laws set limits on workers' wages. Why not let workers make their own agreements, just as lawmakers can decide what to charge for the use of their farms and houses? Their labor is all the property they have. Why take away that little property and the little freedom they enjoy? The effects of these laws make their unfairness even clearer. When a law fixes wages, the legal wage stays the same while every other cost rises. The lawmakers then impose new taxes. So one law increases living costs, while another takes away the means of meeting them.

If these gentlemen who make laws and taxes think it right to limit the small earnings from a person's labor, which must support a whole family, they should surely be happy to accept a limit on their own income. They would still get no less than twelve thousand a year from property they never earned, and that their ancestors probably never earned either. They have put it to such bad use.

I have finished this subject. I will now put all its parts together before moving on.

The first eight measures, listed earlier, are:

1 Abolish two million pounds in poor rates.

2 Provide for two hundred and fifty-two thousand poor families, paying four pounds per child under fourteen years of age. With an additional two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, this also pays for the education of one million and thirty thousand children.

3 Pay six pounds a year to each poor person, struggling former tradesperson, and others in similar circumstances, estimated at seventy thousand people, from age fifty until sixty.

4 Pay ten pounds a year for life to each poor person, struggling former tradesperson, and others in similar circumstances, estimated at seventy thousand people, from age sixty.

5 Pay twenty shillings each for fifty thousand births.

6 Pay twenty shillings each for twenty thousand marriages.

7 Set aside twenty thousand pounds for the funerals of people who travel in search of work and die far from their friends.

8 Provide work at all times for people who fall into poverty in the cities of London and Westminster.

Second List

9 Abolish the tax on houses and windows.

10 Pay three shillings a week for life to fifteen thousand discharged soldiers, with a proportionate payment to the officers of those discharged units.

11 Increase the annual pay of the soldiers who remain in service by £19,500 in total.

12 Give the discharged navy the same payments as the discharged army, and give those who remain the same pay increase.

13 Abolish the commutation tax.

14 Introduce a progressive tax designed to eliminate the unfair and unnatural law of primogeniture and the harmful influence of the aristocratic system.*39

As I said earlier, one million pounds in tax revenue will still be left over. Some of it will be needed for circumstances we cannot yet foresee. Any amount not needed can be used to cut taxes further by that amount.

Justice also requires attention to lower-ranking tax officials. It reflects badly on any government to spend so much revenue on paid positions with no duties, or on unnecessary positions and officials in name only, while denying a decent living to the people doing the actual work. For more than one hundred years, the salaries of lower-ranking revenue officials have stayed below fifty pounds a year. They should be seventy. About one hundred and twenty thousand pounds would bring all those salaries up to a decent level.

This was proposed almost twenty years ago. But the treasury board at the time was alarmed: the army and navy might expect the same treatment. Instead, the King, or someone acting for him, asked Parliament to raise his own salary by one hundred thousand pounds a year. That was done, and everything else was dropped.

I will not say more here about another group, lower-ranking clergy. Put aside all favoritism and prejudice for or against different kinds of religion. Simple fairness will settle whether one clergyman should receive twenty or thirty pounds a year while another receives ten thousand. I can speak more freely about this because I am known not to be a Presbyterian. Court flatterers therefore cannot use their familiar, empty cry about the established church and other places of worship to attack me. They keep raising that issue to distract and confuse the country.

People on both sides, can you not see what the court is doing? If it can keep you arguing about the established church and other places of worship, you serve every courtier's purpose. Meanwhile, courtiers live on tax money and laugh at how easily you are fooled. Every religion that teaches people to be good is good. I know of none that teaches them to be bad.

All these calculations assume that only sixteen and a half million pounds in taxes reaches the treasury after collection costs and rebates at customs and excise offices. In fact, the sum reaching the treasury is very nearly seventeen million, if not the full amount. Taxes raised in Scotland and Ireland are spent there, so their savings will come from their own taxes. But if any of that money is paid into the English treasury, it could be sent back. This would make less than one hundred thousand pounds a year of difference.

Only the national debt remains to be considered. In 1789, interest on it, excluding the tontine, was £9,150,138. The minister knows best how much of the principal has since been paid off. But after paying interest, abolishing the house and window tax, the commutation tax, and the poor rates, providing for the poor, educating children, supporting older people and those discharged from the army and navy, and increasing the pay of those still serving, one million pounds will still be left over.