114 Hustory of Local Rates 
oversight. There was no effective opposition, in con- 
sequence of the prevalence of agreements on the part 
of the occupier to pay all rates. The fact that, as was 
alleged in 1823, ninety-nine tenants out of a hundred 
agreed not to deduct the rate! of course did not 
diminish the injustice of refusing to allow the hun- 
dredth to deduct it when he had made no agreement 
not to do so. That such an injustice could be per- 
petrated in 1888 is strong testimony to the strength 
of the tendency towards consolidation on the basis of 
the poor-rate. In the case of the sewers expendi- 
ture of the London borough councils the right of 
deduction from rent still exists, but is almost uni- 
versally ignored, the occupier almost always under- 
faking to bear all rates. 
Of the later local rates, the first in chronological 
order is the land-tax. Simply because it happens to 
retain the term “tax” in its title, and because its 
proceeds go to the national exchequer, the land-tax is 
not usually reckoned as a local rate. But as it is a sum 
determined beforehand, and levied at different rates 
in different localities, it has the essential features of a 
rate and a local rate, and no comparison of the rates 
of two parishes is complete which omits it from con- 
sideration. 
Though it is usually said to have been established 
after the Revolution, the true origin of the land-tax 
is to be found in the somewhat rough-and-ready 
method ‘of raising money adopted by the Long Par- 
liament. Requisitions for particular sums of money 
were at first laid upon those counties which were sub- 
ject to the power of the Parliament. The requisitions 
1 Report on Sewers, 1823 (see above, p. 113, note 2), p. 39. 
* London Government Act, 1899, 8. 12,