The Industrial Revolution

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1027928145

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-159926

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Cunningham, William http://d-nb.info/gnd/128907487

Title:: The Industrial Revolution

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: The University Press

Year of publication:: 1922

Scope:: xxii S., S. 404-886

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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A.D. 1689 -1776. 10 that he might be ble to dispense with the land tax. 430 PARLIAMENTARY COLBERTISM ntentions in an admirable speech, in which he expressed his hope that the measure would “tend to make London a free port and by consequence the market of the world.” But his opinion was not endorsed by the City men themselves; the Bill was carried in the House of Commons by 249 to 189, but an agitation against the measure was fomented in London, Nottingham, and other towns; and Sir Robert Walpole, sensible that “in the present inflamed temper of the people the Act could not be carried into execution with- out an armed force?” determined to abandon the scheme. Had the measure been successful, Walpole expected that he would be able to redress some of the admitted in- equalities in the incidence of taxation. He had succeeded in reducing the advantage, which the moneyed men enjoyed from the new finance, by lowering the rate of interest on the public funds from 8 or 6 to 4 per cent.; and as he had also reduced the land tax from 4s. to 1s3, he had done something to mitigate the sense of injustice from which the sountry gentlemen suffered. He hoped to be able to go farther, and abolish the land tax altogether; there were extraordinary inequalities in the manner in which it was levied, and Walpole asserted that it had “ continued so long and laid so heavy that many a landed gentleman in this kingdom had thereby been utterly ruined and undone.” But with the failure of his excise scheme, and the impossibility of finding any other source of revenue, it was inevitable that Lt Coxe, op. cit. ir. 106. 2 Id., op. cit. 111. 115, » Tn 1731 and 1732. Dowell, op. cst. m. 96. 1 Davenant, who examined into the matter with great care, showed that the home counties were assessed much more heavily than those in the north and west. This had been due at first to the manner in which the Commonwealth had laid the heaviest burden upon the counties on which they could rely. An unsuccessful attempt was made to correct this at the Restoration, when the assessment for ship money had been taken as a model, on account of the known care with which t had been made. An excellent account of the method adopted in 1634 will be found in Mr E. Cannan's History of Local Rates in England, 50. Davenant sndeavours to show, by appealing to the excise, the poll tax, the hearth rate and she poor rate, that the northern and western counties had improved more rapidly shan the home counties in the intervening period, and should therefore pay a larger juota than was charged upon them in the property tax (Davenant, Ways and Means, in Works, 1. 32—62). The property tax was thus doubly unfair, since it fell sxclusively upon real property, and as land of equal value in different counties bore very dissimilar shares of the burden. See p. 604 n. 3 below.

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