and scanty fare. And as the necessity for making still further retrenchments does not appear to be at all diminished, it is but too certain, if no means are taken to relieve the overloaded springs of industry, and to stimulate the natural demand for labour, that the ordinary rate of wages will be reduced to such a sum as will barely enable the labouring class to exist, and to continue their race. Whenever wages have been reduced thus low, it is true that they can sink no lower; and then, but not till then, the labourer will be beyond the reach of taxation; and every tax affecting the commodities indispensable for his support, will be paid by his employer, or, which is the same thing, will directly and immediately fall on the profits of stock.

It is impossible, however, to conceive a more wretched state of society, than that in which the bulk of the people are reduced to a dependence on mere necessaries. In those countries,' Mr Ricardo has well observed, where the labouring classes have the fewest wants, and are contented with the cheapest food, the 'people are exposed to the greatest vicissitudes and miseries. They have no place of refuge from calamity; they cannot seek safety in a lower station; they are already so low, that they can fall no lower. On any deficiency of the chief articles of their subsistence, there are few substitutes of which they can avail themselves; and dearth to them is attended with almost all the evils of famine.' Nor is this all:-Men placed in such circumstances, and cut off, as they must be, from all hope of rising in the world, naturally sink into a state of indolence and insensibility. They may not be discontented; but it is not in the nature of things that they should be either active or industrious, No man submits to privations and labour, but in the hope of obtaining corresponding comforts. Where there is no power, there can be no motive to accumulate; and, what perhaps is still worse, where the mass of the people are sunk in the abyss of poverty-where they have no stake in the hedge-it is impossible they should feel any great respect for the rights of those who have: And it is but too evident, that it is only by the terrors of the criminal law, that such persons can be prevented from breaking down those institutions which, however essential to the maintenance of society, must appear to them, not as bulwarks raised for the public benefit, but for the support and protection of a favoured few.

From what has been already stated, it is easy to perceive, that the effect of a heavy taxation in depressing the condition of the labouring classes, must be very much influenced by the comparative rapidity of its increase. A slow and gradual increase of taxation, inasmuch as it would not suddenly deprive the lower

classes of any considerable portion of their accustomed comforts and enjoyments, would most probably stimulate them to endeavour to preserve their place in society, as much by delaying the formation of matrimonial connexions, as by contracting the scale of their expenditure. The last is always a painful reTo retrograde is not natural to man. The desire to improve our circumstances, and to acquire an increased command over the necessaries and luxuries of life, is deeply seated in the human breast, and has been found sufficiently strong to counteract one of the most powerful instincts of our nature. Previous to the commencement of the late French war, the condition of the labouring classes in England was not very different from that of the same class in the United States; the greater facility of providing for a family, which enabled the labourers of America to contract early marriages, and to double their numbers in twenty or four-and-twenty years without depressing wages, being balanced in England, where the population could not be doubled in less than 100 years, without degrading the condition of the labourer, by the greater prevalence of moral restraint. It is plain, however, that this greater efficacy of the check on the increase of population, arising from prudential considerations, could not be occasioned by any sudden decrease in the demand for labour in England; it was evidently the result of habits which had been formed in the course of many previous centuries, and which naturully develop themselves in every country as society advances, and as it becomes more difficult to acquire the means of subsistence.

Were the fiat of Almighty Power at once to deprive America of her boundless tracts of fertile and unappropriated land, or to render her population as dense as that of England, the existing habit of early marriages would be productive of incalculable misery. But, on the more rational hypothesis, that the impossibility of being able permanently to provide for the wants of an increasing population, shall gradually manifest itself, a corresponding change will be effected in the habits of the people; and the rate of their increase will be more nearly proportioned to the altered circumstances of the country. Now, it cannot be denied that Taxation, by increasing the cost of commodities, operates in precisely the same way as a deterioration of the powers of the soil, or as any other cause which has the effect of rendering it more difficult to procure a comfortable subsistence; and therefore, its slow and gradual increase, by adding to the efficacy of the principle of moral restraint, has a tendency to relieve society of some part of the evils of which it is always productive. But a sudden increase of taxation is unaccompanied

by any alleviating circumstance. The mischiefs which it occasions are pure and unmixed. It precludes the possibility of previously changing or modifying the habits of those subjected to its operation. They are immediately forced to relinquish a greater or less proportion of the comforts to which they have been accusomed: And if they ever recover the station from which they must in the mean time be cast down, it can only be after a period of suffering and distress, and after they have been exposed to the hazard of permanent degradation, by losing a proper sense of what is necessary to their comfortable ex*istence.

But, a direct tax on wages, or, which is the same thing, on the commodities indispensable for the support of the labouring classes, is not objectionable on the single ground of its having a constant tendency to degrade their condition in society. Taxation, in every form, presents only a choice of evils. Supposing, which is extremely improbable, that, notwithstanding the suffering and distress occasioned by the imposition of a heavy tax, the sentiments of the people are not degraded, and that an efficient check being given to the rate at which population was previously increasing, wages are in the long run advanced proportionally to the tax; still the condition of society would be altered very much to the worse. The profits of stock would now be diminished in the precise proportion that wages had been increased. For, Mr Ricardo has demonstrated, that, whatever is added to wages, must be taken from profits; and conversely. Dr Smith, who was not aware of this fundamental principle, supposed that a heavy taxation on necessaries neither fell on the capitalists nor the labourers, but on the consumers generally; and that it was always in the power of the producers to indemnify themselves for a rise of wages, by enhancing the price of the commodities brought to market. But it is easy to see that no general rise of wages can have any such effect. Commodities are in every case bought by commodities; and as a rise of wages must affect, in an equal degree, the producers of every different article, it cannot possibly derange their relative values one with another, or occasion any increase of price.

It appears, therefore, that a slow and gradual increase of taxation, by adding to the efficacy of the principle of moral restraint, has a tendency to raise the rate of wages, and, consequently, to throw the burden from the shoulders of the labourer to those of his employer. But, even in this its least obnoxious shape, it is not easy to estimate all the evils it occasions. A sacrifice on the part of a great proportion of society, of all the delights of virtuous love, and of all the endearments of conjugal affection, is indispensably necessary to preserve the inha

bitants of a heavily taxed country from sinking into the most abject and helpless poverty: though it is by no means certain that even this sacrifice of the finer feelings and affections will be sufficient to secure them a proper share of the necessaries and luxuries of life. The fall of profits consequent on a rise of wages caused by excessive taxation, not only checks the increase of that fund by whose increase the increase of the productive industry of the country must always be regulated, but it has a powerful effect in stimulating its transfer to other countries. The efflux of capital is one of the worst consequences of excessive taxation; and it is one against which it is impossibleto guard. The rate of profit has a constant tendency to equalize itself. The same principle which would prevent the employment of capital in Yorkshire, if it did not yield the same rate of profit that might be derived from investing it in Kent or Surrey, regulates its distribution among the different countries of the world. It is true, the difference in the rate of profit must be considerably greater, to occasion a transference of capital from one country to another, than from different provinces of the came country. But a comparatively heavy taxation is more than sufficient to occasion this difference. Previous to the late revolutionary contests, the bulk of the capital belonging to the merchants of Holland was vested in foreign countries; and the experience of the last four or five years has shown, that the low rate of profit in this country, is enough to counterbalance the risk attending the lending of money even on Prussian security.

It is thus that heavy taxes on necessaries become, in the words of Dr Smith, a curse equal to the barrenness of the soil, and the inclemency of the heavens.' Such taxes must necessarily fall either on wages or on profits. To whatever extent they diminish wages, they must equally diminish the comforts and enjoyments of the largest and most important class in society, and spread pauperism, misery, and crime throughout the country; while, on the other hand, they cannot diminish profits, without occasioning a corresponding diminution of the power to accumulate capital, and without also stimulating its transfer to those countries, in which taxation is less oppressive. In the first case, their effect in degrading the condition of society, is instantaneously felt; in the second, it is brought about more slowly and circuitously; but in both, they are, in the end, nearly equally destructive of the happiness and future improvement of the society in which they have been carried to an inordinate extent.

But, if such be a tolerably correct estimate of the effects of a heavy taxation on the condition of society, we can be at no

loss to account for the increase of pauperism since 1793. During this period, the public burdens have been augmented to an extent unknown in any former age or country. No source of revenue, however trifling, and no necessary, however indispensable, not to comfort merely but existence, has been able to elude the grasp of the taxgatherer. Mr Pitt, and the subsequent Chancellors of the Exchequer, whatever may be thought of their merits in other respects, must be admitted to have had no equals in the devising of means to divert the greatest possible portion of the wealth of the country, into the coffers of Government. It is no exaggeration to affirm, that, with the solitary exception of water, there is not a single necessary consumed in the Empire, which is not, directly or indirectly, loaded with a most oppressive impost. Nor has the rapidity of the increase of taxation been less extraordinary, than the extent to which it has been carried. For example, the duty on tea, which, in 1793, was only 12 per cent., is now more than eight times as much, or 100 per cent. The duty on salt, which amounts (in England) to 15s. a bushel, or to about thirty times its natural cost, was tripled in 1805. The duty on lea ther, after being stationary for more than a century, was doubled in 1812. And the various duties on sugar, beer, spirits, soap, candles, tobacco, &c. besides the house-tax, window-tax, and stamp-duty, have all been increased in similar proportions. But, in order to show the progress of taxation, it is not necessary to engage in the endless and irksome task of enumerating the different articles on which new duties have been imposed, or the old ones increased. It is sufficient to mention, that the total payments into the Exchequer in 1793, on account of permanent and temporary duties, amounted to 17,674,395l.; in 1804, they had increased to 49,335,978., or to nearly three times their amount in 1793; in 1808, they exceeded the enor mous sum of 66 millions; and in 1819, in the fifth year of the peace, they amounted to 47,990,8144., or to very nearly their amount in the eleventh year of the war. During the American war, the revenue, when greatest, never reached the sum of 18

millions!

Had this increased taxation sufficed to defray the entire expenses of the war, however oppressive in the mean time, its reduction on the cessation of hostilities would have enabled the country to avail itself of its many natural advantages, and again to spring forward in the career of improvement. This, however, was very far from being the case. It appears, from accounts printed by order of the House of Commons, that the gross produce of the revenue of Great Britain, for the twenty