46 
THE A B C OF TAXATION 
“But whatever may be thought of the legitimacy of making 
the State a sharer in all future increase of rent from natural 
causes, the existing land tax (which in this country-[England] 
unfortunately is very small) ought not to be regarded as a tax, 
but as a rent-charge in favour of the public; a portion of the 
rent, reserved from the beginning by the State, which has never 
belonged to or formed part of the income of the landlords, and 
should not, therefore, be counted to them as part of their taxation, 
so as to exempt them from their fair share of every other tax. 
As well might the title be regarded as a tax on the landlords; 
as well, in Bengal, where the State, though entitled to the whole 
rent of the land, gave away one-tenth of it to individuals, retain 
ing the other nine-tenths, might those nine-tenths be considered 
as an unequal and unjust tax on the grantees of the tenth. That 
a person owns part of the rent does not make the rest of it his 
just right, injuriously withheld from him. The landlords 
originally held their estates subject to feudal burdens, for which 
the present land tax is an exceedingly small equivalent, and for 
their relief from which they should have been required to pay a 
much higher price. All who have bought land since the tax 
existed have bought it subject to the tax. There is not the 
smallest pretence for looking upon it as a payment exacted from 
the existing race of landlords. 
“These observations are applicable to a land tax only in so 
far as it is a peculiar tax and not when it is merely a mode of 
levying from the landlords the equivalent of what is taken from 
other classes. In France, for example, there are peculiar 
taxes on other kinds of property and income (the mohilier and 
the patente), and supposing the land tax to be not more than 
equivalent to these, there would be no ground for contending 
that the State had reserved to itself a rent-charge on the land. 
But wherever and in so far as income derived from land is 
prescriptively subject to a deduction for public purposes, beyond 
the rate of taxation levied on other incomes, the surplus is not 
properly taxation, but a share of the property in the soil, reserved 
by the State. In this country there are no peculiar taxes on other