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.