Peers being great landowners, therefore land, as well as their persons, enjoys immunities which do not attach to chattel property. A noble lord may run into as much debt as he pleases, and then, with impunity, defraud all his creditors. He may live in the utmost profusion; he may borrow money to support his extravagance, or for providing portions for younger children, making the most solemn promises, or even giving his written engagement to repay it; or he may raise loans, and with these loans buy houses and land, and when he dies leave the houses and land purchased with this borrowed money to whom he pleases: and in all these cases the lenders who have trusted to the honour of a peer have no power to touch a shilling worth of his real estates.

These are a few of the privileges of peers; we shall proceed to illustrate other results of aristocratic legislation.

III. INJUSTICE OF ARISTOCRATIC TAXATION,

Nothing can demonstrate more incontestibly the necessity of the different interests in society being represented in the general government than the course of fiscal legislation. The political power of the state, we need not repeat nor explain, is in this country consolidated in the aristocracy. If we only glance at public burthens we shall see with what admirable adroitness they have been distributed, so as to press as lightly as possible on those who imposed them, and with disproportionate weight on those who had no share in their imposition. Does not this show better than all the general reasoning in the world the utility of universal representation; otherwise, whatever interest is unprotected will assuredly be sacrificed, and this injustice will be perpetrated by the dominant party, however exalted this dominant party may be by birth, by station, by education, by wealth, or other adventitious circumstance.

The landed

Let us appeal to facts in illustration of this principle. interest is the primary interest of the Aristocracy; whatever tends to enhance the value of land or its produce tends directly to augment their incomes. Hence, their leading policy has been to protect agriculture, to encourage husbandry, by abstaining from burthening it with imposts, to impose no additional tax on land, and above all things to secure the home market against competition from abroad. For this latter purpose they have passed laws the most unjust and outrageous; the importation of some articles they have absolutely prohibited; others they have loaded with heavy duties; so that they have been able to sell their own produce at a monopoly price.

The following list of articles of foreign production, and the import duties to which they are subject, will show to what extent the landowners have availed themselves of political power to promote their own interests, by excluding foreign competition.

Wheat 16s. 5d. a quarter to 1s. according as the price rises from 61s. to 70s. a quarter.

Barley 13s. 10d. a quarter to 1s. according as the price rises, from 32s. to 40s. a quarter.

Oats 10s. 9d. a quarter to ls. according as the price rises from 24s. to 31s. a quarter.

Beef, lamb, mutton, pork, sheep, and swine are prohibited to be imported, by 6 Geo. IV. c. 117.

While the landowners have been strenuously exerting themselves to close, hermetically, if possible, the home market against foreign agricultural produce, they have, with admirable consistency of policy, been at the same time endeavouring to throw it wide open for the admission of foreign manufactures. This places their conduct in a most conspicuous light. Surely, if a free trade in manufactures was for the benefit of the community, so was a free trade in the produce of the soil. But, then, our feudal Solons do not deal in cotton, nor silk, nor hardwares; they are only dealers in corn, and that makes all the

difference. The working and effects of this abominable system has been justly and spiritedly versified in the following lines:

Ye coop us up and tax our bread,

And wonder why we pine;

But ye're fat, and round, and red,

And fill'd with tax-bought wine.

Thus twelve rats starve, while three rats thrive,

(Like you on mine and me);

When fifteen rats are caged alive

With food for nine and three.

Haste! havoc's torch begins to glow,

The ending is begun ;

Make haste! destruction thinks ye slow;
Make haste to be undone!

Why are ye call'd my Lord' and 'Squire,'
While fed by mine and me:

And wringing food, and clothes, and fire
From bread-tax'd misery?

Make haste, slow rogues, prohibit trade,

Prohibit honest gain;

Turn all the good that God hath made

To fear, and hate, and pain.

Till beggars all-assassins all,
All cannibals we be;

And death shall have no funeral

From shipless sea to sea.-Corn-Law Rhymes.

It is not a difficult problem to ascertain the annual burthen imposed on the community by the corn-tax. It appears, from the resolutions submitted to the House of Commons by Lord Milton, that the average price of wheat in this country, in the year ending February 1830, had been 64s. 2d. per quarter. The average price on the Continent and in America, during the same period, had been 46s. 3d. per quarter. Now, if there were no restrictions on the importation of corn, the price in England would be nearly the same as in Poland or in the United States; but, in consequence of the boroughmongers' tax, the price is about 20s. per quarter higher so that, if the annual consumption of corn by the community be 48 millions of quarters, they pay exactly so many pounds additional, in order to swell the rents of the land

owners.*

A tax upon bread is the most oppressive and unjust that could be imposed on the industrious classes. A man with £50 a-year consumes,

We suppose all our readers have read Colonel Thompson's Catechism of the Corn Laws, price six-pence. His True Theory of Rent, price three-pence, is another admirable publication. The public is indebted to this gentleman for having placed the science of Political Economy on its legs again it now stands much where it did when Adam Smith left it, after a perilous escape through the thick cloud of darkness in which it had been enveloped by the misleading subtleties of Mr. Ricardo and his followers.

individually, as much bread as a man with £50,000, and consequently sustains as great an annual loss by the artificial enhancement of its price. All taxes on articles of ordinary consumption fall in the same disproportionate manner. They are like a fixed per-centage on income, levied indiscriminately on every person, without regard to large or small revenues. Sugar, tea, and malt are articles of general use; and the labourer and artisan contribute exactly in the same proportion as a lord on their individual consumption of those commodities. In fact, it is to duties of this description the Aristocracy have always shown a marked partiality; the excise, it is known, being the most productive branch of the revenue. Mr. Pitt used to say that the high price of labour in England arose chiefly from the excise; three-fifths of the wages of a poor man passing into the exchequer. But no such proportion of the incomes of the Aristocracy flows into the public treasury.

Yet it is the incomes of the landed interest, as we shall briefly illustrate, which form the most legitimate and unexceptionable fund for taxation. A person who employs himself in making a pair of shoes or inexpressibles adds nothing to the value of the leather or cloth beyond the price of his labour. Land, however, is a more profitable material to work upon; yielding not only a produce adequate to defray the expenses of its culture, but also a surplus; and this surplus constitutes the landlord's rent. But the soil of every country belongs to the people; consequently, the rent or surplus revenue it yields is not so much the property of a particular class of individuals as of the whole community. It follows that the landowners are only so many pensioners or sinecurists, paid out of a revenue which originally constituted the sole fund out of which all the exigencies of state were provided. Instead of the "Lords of the Soil" taxing every article we eat and drink, and impeding, with vexatious imposts, every operation of industry, they ought to have laid a direct tax on rent, which would have been easily and economically collected. They have acted quite the reverse. The Land-Tax continues to be levied at this day according to the defective valuation in the reign of William III.; and, in 1798, it was made perpetual at 4s. in the pound on the inadequate estimate of the rental at the Revolution. In France the foncier, or land-tax, amounts to one-fourth of the whole annual revenue;* in England it does not amount to a sixtieth part. The proportion of our excise, customs, and assessed taxes to similar taxes in France, is as forty-five to twenty; while the proportion of the public revenue of the former to that of the latter is as three to two.

Need we say any thing further to illustrate the tendency of aristocratic taxation, or the selfish purposes to which the political power of the Oligarchy has been perverted? Yes, we shall briefly add a few more facts.

Lowe's Present State of England, p. 318.

When the income-tax was imposed, or rather when it was screwed up by the Whigs, in 1806, lands and tenements were assessed at 2s. in the pound. Precisely the same assessment was laid on incomes arising from professions, trade, or other vocation. Thus was as heavy a tax levied on revenue not worth five years' purchase as on revenue worth thirty years' purchase; in other words, the tax was six times heavier on the industrious than on the unproductive classes of the community. A merchant, attorney, tradesman, or shopkeeper, whose income depended entirely on his personal exertions-which ceased at his death-and by savings from which he could alone make a provision for his children after his decease, was taxed six times to the amount of the landowner, by whom the burthen was imposed-whose property was entailed, and protected from all liability for debts however extravagantly incurred.

If the Boroughmongers ever charge themselves with any burthens, they are always prompt to get rid of them the first opportunity, though they touch them ever so lightly, and have been rendered necessary by their own infatuated measures. Thus, immediately after the peace, before any reduction in the public establishments, or in the amount of the monstrous debt they had contracted, the income-tax was abolished. Again, the duty on horses employed in husbandry has been long since repealed, but the malt-tax is still continued, and the beer-duty-the most unfair and oppressive of all duties-was only repealed within these two years.

From some duties the peerage is exempted altogether. A lord of parliament sends and receives all letters free of postage; he usually franks the letters of all his relatives and friends; he enjoys, also, the privilege of sending a letter from London by the post on Sunday—a sort of sabbath-breaking which would be considered impiety or perhaps blasphemy in another person.

It would be tedious to go through the whole roll of taxes, to show how indulgent our legislators have been to themselves and how unjust towards the rest of the community. If a lord by inheritance succeed to an estate worth £100,000, he has not a shilling to pay to government. If a rich merchant dies, and bequeaths as much to his children, they are taxed to the amount of £1500, or, if there is no will, to the amount of £2250. If a poor man buy a cottage for £10, he has 10s. or one-twentieth part of the purchase-money, to pay for a conveyance. If a nobleman buy an estate worth £50,000, the stamp-duty is only onehundred-and-eleventh part of the purchase-money, or £450. A similarly unequal tax is incurred in borrowing small sums on bond or mortgage, while special favour is shown to those who borrow large sums. If a man has eight windows in his house he is assessed 16s. 6d.; if he has one more he is charged 4s. 6d. for it. If a lord has 180 windows he is charged £46: 11:3; and if he has one more he is charged only 1s. 6d.; and he may have as many more additional windows as he pleases at the same low rate of assessment. If a poor man's horse, or his ass, pass through a toll-bar there is something to pay, of course;