200 History of Local Rates 
lower in the area containing the wealthy district than 
in the other, and people and property will be attracted 
into it as compared with the other. There seems to be 
no possible justification for this: it cannot possibly 
lead to any good result, I certainly fail to see why 
places should be higher taxed because they are more 
largely the homes of the people for whose benefit the 
faxes are raised. 
(2) Inequalities of this kind tend to improper distri- 
bution of total resources by causing expenditure for 
the necessary purposes under discussion to be too 
stinted in some places and too lavish in others. It is 
not so certain, as we often think, that a high rate must 
be more burdensome than a low one in any particular 
case: the ultimate burden of the high rate may be 
upon richer persons than that of the low one. But 
this is only a chance: in the average of cases it can 
scarcely be so, and therefore, as a rule, the higher rate 
is more burdensome; and whether it is or not, it 
always seems so to the people who are hit in the first 
instance. ‘Moreover, people as a rule compare the 
rates of different places with very little regard to the 
different circumstances, and are apt to attribute high 
rates to inefficiency or too lavish expenditure. The 
inevitable consequence is a certain amount of profusion 
in some places and uneconomical stinting in others. 
The practical question is whether we can devise 
means for reducing the tendency to wrong distribution 
of people and property and to uneconomical distribu- 
tion of expenditure without introdueing greater evils. 
There is not, I think, much difficulty about the 
principle. The ideal procedure would be to ascertain 
for each rateable area the amount of the “onerous ”’